The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has put personal care and support service Scotland Road Branch into special measures to protect their users, after rating them as Inadequate after an inspection in March this year.
We have told the service that they must make improvements to protect the safety and welfare of people using the service.
Under CQC’s new programme of inspections, all adult social care services are being given a rating to help people choose care. We ask five questions, are services; safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led. Overall, Scotland Road Branch has been rated as Inadequate.
Local Solutions, the company which runs Scotland Road Branch is a not for profit social enterprise, predominantly operating across the North West of England. The organisation is a registered charity and it does not recruit nurses. It provides personal care and support for people living in their own homes. At the time of our inspection there were 892 people using the service and 349 care staff.
The full report from the inspection can be found here on our website: www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-132766220/reports
The report identifies a number of areas in which improvements are required, including:
- Most staff members we spoke with had heard of the term Safeguarding and described how they would report an incident but only one staff member we spoke to mentioned abuse when asked about Safeguarding.
- Therefore, we were concerned staff only had a basic awareness of Safeguarding. We looked at the care records and found risk assessments were either absent or did not contain detailed enough information to keep people safe. Staff providing care to people with complex needs had not been trained adequately. We could not find medication risk assessments or medication care plans.
- People were not always receiving care at a time which suited them and told us they fitted around the needs of the service. We found the system of care delivery did not allow staff travel time in between their calls which meant staff were either having to leave early to enable them to arrive at their next call on time, or be late for their next call. This was impacting on people who received the care as they were not receiving care for the duration of the call.
Debbie Westhead, Deputy Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care in the North, said:
“People are entitled to services which provide safe, effective, compassionate and high quality care.
“Our first instinct is to make sure the service improves, but we must also take action to protect people.
“We will continue to monitor the provider’s progress in actioning the necessary improvements to ensure that people using the service receive the quality of care they are entitled to expect. We expect them to work with partners to look at ways of improving, and how they can sustain those changes until the next time we inspect and beyond.”
Services placed in special measures will be kept under review. In terms of our enforcement actions, we have issued a warning notice to Scotland Road Branch regarding good governance relating to the registered manager. The Registered Manager was only on site twice per month and did not have overall oversight of the service on a day to day basis. Policies were not always being followed and there was no policy on Consent. During the course of our inspection, no one mentioned they had spoken to the Registered Manager or had met the Registered Manager.
If insufficient action is taken to address these issues we will take further action in line with our enforcement procedures.
Ends
For further information please contact CQC Regional Communications Officer Kerri James by email kerri.james@cqc.org.uk or by phone on 07464 92 9966. Journalists wishing to speak to the press office outside of office hours can find out how to contact the team here. Please note: the press office is unable to advise members of the public on health or social care matters.
For general enquiries, please call 03000 61 61 61.
Find out more
Read reports from our checks on the standards at Scotland Road Branch