The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published a report following an inspection at Saint Jude Care Home in Sefton, Liverpool in October.
CQC undertook an unannounced focused inspection to look at whether it is safe and well-led, to check the provider had met all the legal requirements following the last inspection in January.
The care home, which was previously rated as requires improvement, is now rated inadequate overall and has been placed into special measures to focus their management team on the areas where urgent improvements are needed. CQC has also rated the service as inadequate for being safe and well-led.
Saint Jude Care Home is a residential care home that can support up to 22 people aged 65 and over, including people living with dementia. At the time of inspection, it was providing personal care to 17 people.
Hayley Moore, CQC’s head of adult social care inspection, said:
“When we inspected Saint Jude Care Home, we were very concerned that there was a lack of leadership, and they hadn’t made sufficient improvements since our previous inspection in January and were still in breach of regulations.
“We found a service that didn’t have good enough systems and processes in place to ensure safe recruitment processes were followed, so people were at risk of being cared for by unsuitable staff. Also, when checks on staff identified concerns, these were not appropriately risk assessed.
“Medicines management wasn’t always good enough. The service didn’t have enough appropriately trained staff to safely give people their medicine and they were also regularly interrupted while doing this, which increases the risk of mistakes being made and people not receiving it when needed.
“Our inspectors saw significant concerns around fire safety. There was no evidence that fire evacuation drills had taken place and some staff were not aware of the process. Also, some radiator covers were missing which put people at risk of burning themselves, and some fire doors didn’t close. Following our inspection, we referred our concerns to the local fire service who carried out checks to ensure people were safe. The provider also responded immediately by addressing our concerns.
“We will monitor the care home closely and will not hesitate to take further action if we feel people are not safe and are at risk of harm.”
Inspectors found the following:
- There were significant concerns with health and safety which put people at risk of harm
- Medicines were not always safely managed. There was no appropriate medicines policy to support the safe management of medicines
- There were no systems in place to effectively and consistently monitor incidents to ensure staff could learn from them to prevent a re-occurrence
- People were not always admitted to the home safely following current COVID-19 guidance
- Risks to people were not always appropriately assessed or managed. Care plans did not contain enough information to support people safely. The manager had identified this concern when they started in August 2021 and had plans to review care records.
Full details of the inspection are given in the report published on our website.
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