Curae Home Care a domiciliary care agency based in Bodmin, Cornwall has been rated as Inadequate overall and placed into special measures by the Care Quality Commission.
This inspection took place on the 4-6 September 2019. The inspection was in response to concerns about the service's performance. These included; reports of people's visits being missed or late, reports of staff being employed without Disclosure and Barring Service checks being completed and concerns about the providers performance.
Curae Home Care is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to older people
living in their own homes in the community. At the time of our inspection the service was supporting 22 people.
Curae Home Care is rated Inadequate for providing safe and well led care. Overall the service is rated Inadequate. The service is now placed into special measures. Previously the service was rated as Good overall.
As a result of the concerns which inspectors found, CQC took urgent enforcement action to ensure people who received services from Curae Home Care were safe.
Debbie Ivanova, CQC’s Deputy Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, said:
“This report made for concerning reading. As a result of this inspection, we had no choice but to use our urgent enforcement powers to protect the people who were living at Curae Home Care as well as suspend the Good rating of the service.
“We appreciate that this has been a difficult time for everyone involved. Our first priority is always the welfare of the people who are using care service. As with all enforcement action the provider has the right to appeal any decision made and so it would be inappropriate to discuss further until all processes are complete.”
Inspectors found the service was short staffed. The provider and the deputy manager were often completing care visits as the service did not have enough staff available to provide all planned care visits.
The service did not have systems in place to record details of missed visits, investigate why visits had been missed or to try to identify learning where things had gone wrong.
People were not always supported safely with their medicines. Medicines administration records (MARs) were not consistently completed and it was not possible to confirm from the records if people had been safely supported with their medicines. Some people required their medication at specific times and the recent unreliability of the service's visit times meant these needs had not been met.
Inspectors had id have significant concerns about the service's performance. People were unnecessarily exposed to the risk of harm because of the service's unreliability and use of inappropriate staff. As a result, on the last day of the inspection, inspectors wrote to the provider to request an urgent explanation as to how they intended to address and resolve these issues. A response was required by 9 September but was not provided.
You can read the report in full at when it is published on the CQC website at: www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-4255426401
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