Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service - Tower Hamlets

The service provides specialist community treatment and support for adults affected by substance misuse who live in Tower Hamlets. This was our first comprehensive inspection of this service.

We rated it as good because:

• The premises where clients were seen were clean and well equipped. Staff responded promptly to sudden deterioration in service users’ physical and mental health. Staff made service users aware of harm minimisation and the risks of continued substance misuse. Staff followed good practice with respect to safeguarding.
• Staff developed holistic, recovery-oriented care plans informed by a comprehensive assessment. They provided a range of treatments suitable to the needs of the service users.
• The teams included or had access to the full range of specialists required to meet the needs of service users under their care. Managers ensured that these staff received training, supervision and appraisal. Staff worked well together as a multidisciplinary team and relevant services outside the organisation.
• Staff treated service users with compassion and kindness and understood the individual needs of service users. They actively involved service users in decisions and care planning.
• The service was easy to access. Staff planned and managed discharge well.
• The service was well led, and the governance processes ensured that its procedures ran smoothly.

However:

• Improvements were needed to the environment. At Whitechapel Road there were not enough rooms to meet with clients and those that were available were not appropriately sound proofed. Whilst additional cleaning procedures were in place to protect people from COVID-19, poor record keeping meant that it was not clear that these always took place.
• Staff did not consistently wear their personal alarms. In one room at the Whitechapel Road site a wall alarm was blocked by furniture. The service user toilet at the Whitechapel Road site did not have a call alarm. There were no records kept on site demonstrating regular and consistent alarm testing.
• Not all staff had completed basic life support training.
• The number of service users on the caseload of some recovery coordinators was too high, preventing staff from maintaining regular contact for 506 (28%) service users.
• The service had 203 (29%) clients receiving medication assisted treatment with medical reviews that were overdue.