The Lighthouse in Darwen, Lancashire has been rated requires improvement overall, following a recent inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The Lighthouse which is run by Associated Wellbeing Limited, is a four-bed child and adolescent inpatient service which provides mental health care to children from age eight to 18.
Inspectors found that staff did not have the appropriate checks in place to ensure they could work with children or adults. Staff involved in restraint had not always had training provided by the service. Using different methods of restraint could result in the children and young people being physically harmed.
They also found children and young people felt uninvolved in their care and that decisions were made without their input.
Following this full comprehensive inspection in March, the service was rated inadequate for being safe, requires improvement for being well-led, effective and caring and rated good for being responsive. The overall rating was requires improvement.
Brian Cranna, CQC’s head of hospital Inspection, said:
“We inspected The Lighthouse in March to look at the overall quality of the service and to see what improvements had been made since our previous inspection.
“During this visit we were disappointed to find that positive behaviour support plans included negative punishment strategies, such as the removal of items or a planned activity being denied. Also, not all restraint was carried out safely and according to the organisation’s policy.
“However, we were pleased to see that leaders had a good understanding of the services they managed and were visible and approachable for patients and staff.
“We have asked the provider to produce an action plan outlining what steps will be taken to improve the standards of quality and safety. We will review this and work alongside them to monitor progress and ensure that improvements are made and fully embedded. We will then return to inspect the service at a later date.”
CQC told the provider they must make the following improvements:
- The service must ensure that all positive behaviour support plans are completed using functional assessments and not include punishment strategies
- The service must ensure that restraint is always carried out safely, staff involved in restraint must be appropriately trained and there must be sufficient numbers of competent staff available to use it
- The service must ensure that a system is available to children and young people so where needed they can call for assistance
- The service must ensure that all staff have the correct disclosure and barring service checks prior to starting employment
- The service must ensure that there are systems and processes in place that capture any failures in governance.
CQC told the provider they should make the following improvements:
- The service should ensure children and young people are supported to participate in the care planning process to ensure children and young people feel involved in their care and future decisions
- The service should ensure they have clear oversight of the quality and frequency of staff supervision.
Full details of the inspection are given in the report published on our website.
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