The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has told RMH (Wispers) Care LLP that it must make urgent improvements at Wispers Park Care Village, Haslemere, Surrey, or face further enforcement action.
During an unannounced inspection in October, inspectors found that the service, in Wispers Lane, was failing to provide care which was safe, effective, caring, or responsive to people’s needs or well led. As a result of the inspection, the provider was issued with two warning notices.
Under CQC’s new programme of inspections, all adult social care services are being given a rating to help people choose care. Overall, Wispers Park Care Village has been rated as Inadequate.
A full report from the inspection has been published on the CQC website: www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-621101430.
The report identifies a number of areas in which improvements were required, including:
- While some people told inspectors they felt very safe at the service, others said that they felt unsafe and that staff did not always protect them from harm. Staff had not always acted to identify and respond to possible abuse, and did not always know how to protect people from harm.
- Some people said that their movement had been restricted due to safety measures in some parts of the service. People had not had their individual best interests considered or been given a choice on these restrictions. People and their relatives had not been consulted about their care, and consent to care and treatment had not be sought or recorded.
- The service did not have enough suitably skilled and experienced staff. People said that they had to wait for support with their personal care, and that they were unable to go out as often as they would like.
- People had not always been properly assessed, and their care was not planned or delivered to meet their individual needs.
- People were not having their nutritional needs met.
- Medicines were not managed safely.
- People were at risk in the event of a fire because the provider had failed to act on the requirements of two fire authority reports. Staff had not been trained to protect people in the event of a fire.
- People had contradictory views about how caring staff were, and said that sometimes the care they received depended on the staff available to care for them. Inspectors saw and were told about instances where staff did not treat people respectfully or in a caring manner. People’s dignity and privacy were not always respected, for example, staff entered people’s rooms without knocking and waiting for people to respond. People were not always receiving the personal care they needed to maintain their dignity, and they or their relatives had not been included in making decisions about their care.
- While the provider had been aware for some time that the quality of care was deteriorating, no action had been taken until two weeks prior to the inspection and during the inspection itself.
Adrian Hughes, CQC’s Deputy Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care in the south, said:
“It is the responsibility of RMH (Wispers) Care LLP to ensure that the service which it provides at Wispers Park Care Village is safe, effective, caring, responsive to the needs of the people living there, and is well led. Our inspection has identified that this is not the case.
“It was disturbing to hear that not everyone living at the service felt safe there – everyone should be able to feel safe in their own home, and the provider needs to take urgent action to make sure that they do.
“We identified a lot of worrying issues here, and we have set them out in the inspection report. There is really now no excuse for the provider not to use the details in that report as an plan for action to improve the service provided to the people living there.
“We will return in due course to check whether the required improvements have been made – and will take further action if they have not. This could include action to cancel the registration of the provider.”
Ends
For media enquiries, call the CQC press office on 020 7448 9401 during office hours or out of hours on 07789 876508.
For general enquiries, call 03000 61 61 61.
Find out more
Read reports from our checks on the standards at Wispers Park Care Village.