The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has again rated Moors Park House in Bishopsteignton, inadequate and kept it in special measures to protect people, following a CQC inspection.
Moors Park House, run by Moors Park (Bishopsteignton) Limited, is a residential care home providing accommodation and personal care to up to 37 older people, some of whom are living with dementia.
This inspection was carried out to check on the improvements they were told to make after being issued with warning notices at a previous CQC inspection. The warning notices were in regards to safeguarding and the management of the service.
Following the inspection, the overall rating for the home, as well as the areas of safe and well-led, have been re-rated as inadequate. The rating for how effective the service is has increased from inadequate to good. Caring and responsive were re- rated as requires improvement.
The service remains in special measures and will continue to be kept under close review to make sure people are safe whilst improvements are made.
Catherine Campbell, CQC deputy director of operations in the south, said:
It was worrying to find that despite some minor improvements, the same level of poor care remained at Moors Park House since our last inspection. Leaders had still not taken enough action to address our serious concerns around the quality of care being provided.
The service had a high reliance on agency staff which impacted care, especially when they hadn’t worked at the service before. Staff told us vacancies meant sometimes people didn’t get out of bed or have a bath or shower, nor did they get to spend quality time with other people at the home. Staff and the local authority had raised concerns about staffing levels with managers, but this hadn’t been addressed by leaders.
We found the service was busy and saw several people waiting for staff to assist them. It was concerning to see people looking for staff and becoming frustrated because they wanted a drink or some reassurance, but no help was available.
People still weren’t always receiving their prescribed medicines as they should. There was a high number of medicines errors, and staff couldn’t always be sure if people had received them correctly. However, we did see that staff gave them to people in a safe and caring way.
People weren’t always protected from abuse and improper treatment. We found incidents where staff didn’t always identify allegations of abuse or make safeguarding referrals to the local authority in line with the services’ policy. This put people at risk of harm as incidents weren’t always investigated properly and lessons learned to help prevent them from happening again.
The service’s records didn’t demonstrate people’s risks were always managed in line with their care plan. For example, one person needed repositioning every two hours, however their care records showed gaps of up to 12 hours.
We have told leaders at Moors Park House where we expect to see immediate and significant improvement. In the meantime, we’ll continue to monitor them closely to make sure people are safe while this happens and won’t hesitate to take further action if this doesn’t happen.
Inspectors also found:
- People’s personal needs likes and preferences still weren’t always fully assessed before they were admitted to the service.
- Most people had been supported to be dressed appropriately and had items that were important to them, such as personal jewellery. However, some people had overgrown fingernails with chipped varnish and dirt beneath the nails.
- There were no systems in place to monitor how much people drank potentially placing them at risk of dehydration.
- External agencies said that while staff demonstrated an intention to work openly and in partnership, the lack of management meant it was sometimes hard to do so.
- Staff told us they had concerns about the consistency of the quality of care people received, including personal and continence care.
- Improvements had been made to people’s care plans and some contained good information, however, care plans lacked information about how staff could support people with their emotional needs
The report will be published on CQC’s website in the next few days.