Autumn House Residential Home

Updated 20 February 2025

We carried out a responsive assessment of Autumn House Residential Home between 4 February and 7 March 2025. This assessment included 3 site visits, 1 of these visits was conducted out of hours. Four inspectors and a medicines inspector were involved in 1 or more of the assessment site visits completed. Autumn House Residential Home is a care home that can accommodate up to 42 people. At the time of our assessment visits there were 27 people living at the service. We carried out this assessment to establish if any improvements had been made following the previous inspection. The provider had failed to address the 11 breaches of Regulation that were identified at our last inspection and continued to remain in breach of these. Additionally, we identified a further breach in relation to staff employed by the service being safely recruited. In instances where CQC have decided to take civil or criminal enforcement action against a provider, we will publish this on our website after any representations and / or appeals have been concluded. This service remains in special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we use our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a timeframe within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide. At the feedback meeting held on the 4 March 2025, the provider told us that they were resigning, and a new provider would be taking over the service.

Updated 20 February 2025

We received mixed feedback from people and their relatives about their experiences of the service and the care provided. Some people and relatives we spoke with expressed they were happy with the care and described staff as amazing, others felt there was a restricted environment for example, a person told us “I am fed up with being locked up all the time”.

Some people could not directly tell us about their experience at Autumn House. We used a structured observation tool to assess whether they received good care.

During our assessment we found shortfalls in people’s experience of care that needed to improve. This included examples where we observed a person becoming distressed and they waited for over half an hour, before staff supported them. We also observed people’s drinks being left out of reach.

We made observations at this assessment and found elements of care did not always meet the expected minimum standards. Shortfalls included people not being served food in line with their assessed dietary needs and risk management requirements.

Where people at the service had dementia, we observed the environment did not always reflect best practice to support people with orientation.

People were not supported to engage in meaningful activities and appeared to have limited interaction.