Valley Lodge Care Home

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• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

We assessed 1 quality statement from this key question. We have combined the score for this area with scores based on the rating from the last inspection, which was good. Although staff mostly spoke about people with kindness, they were not always alert to people’s needs and did not always engage with people.

This service scored 65 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

We did not look at Kindness, compassion and dignity during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.

We did not look at Treating people as individuals during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.

We did not look at Independence, choice and control during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.

Some people’s relatives shared positive feedback, such as, “they look after her very well”, but others shared concerns. For example, 1 person’s relative felt their loved one was bored and unkempt. A person told us they were unhappy because they had been waiting for a haircut for 5 weeks.

Staff we spoke with clearly cared about people and were passionate about their roles. However, there was a focus on reacting to and managing incidents, instead of anticipating and preventing them.

We saw little meaningful engagement with people and staff were not proactive in anticipating people’s needs. On both visits to the service, we saw people sat in the lounge most of the day with few activities or stimulation. When a person who was sat in a chair in the lounge without a view of the television asked, “What are we meant to be doing?” a staff member replied, “We are all to stay sitting here”. We saw 1 person who appeared distressed looking for and asking others to find their relative, who had passed away. They approached staff on multiple occasions who said, “[relative] is not here, it’s alright”, on a second occasion they asked the person if they could “just sit down for a minute” and on a third occasion just asked them to sit down “otherwise you are going to fall”. The person appeared to become more unsettled after each interaction, but staff did not respond to this. However, we also saw some kind and responsive interactions between people and staff. For example, staff noticed immediately when a person spilled a cold drink on themselves and supported them to change.

We did not look at Workforce wellbeing and enablement during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.