Aaron House Care Limited in Nailsworth remains rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and in special measures, following an inspection carried out in June.
A focused inspection was carried out to follow up on enforcement action taken at the last inspection when CQC issued two warning notices to the service to ensure people received safe care and treatment.
The home is registered to accommodate up to six autistic people or people with a learning disability.
Following this inspection, the service remains rated inadequate overall. Safe and well-led were inspected but there wasn’t enough evidence to rate these areas. How effective, caring and responsive weren’t inspected, and remain unrated.
As the home remains in special measures CQC will continue to monitor it closely, and it will be inspected again to assess whether improvements have been made.
Cath Campbell, CQC deputy director of operations in the south of England, said:
“We found that since our last inspection of Aaron House Care Limited, the provider had made some improvements to the service. However, not all of the requirements of the warning notices had been fully met so these are still active.
“A new manager was in place and had implemented systems to look at some aspects of the service such as stocks of medication and people’s finances. However, we still didn’t see a system in place to monitor or improve the quality of the service. This meant the concerns we identified at this inspection hadn’t been picked up by the provider's own systems and there wasn’t a process to ensure things were continuously improving.
“People's care documentation hadn’t been reviewed since the last inspection to provide staff with an effective assessment and management plan of people's risks. For example, we found one person’s care plan hadn’t been updated despite changes in how their epilepsy was presenting and what staff should look out for. This placed people at risk of not receiving safe care they deserve.
“It was disappointing people still weren’t being supported to have as much choice as possible about their care, or the activities they wanted to do at Aaron House, even after us telling them they needed to make improvements in this area previously.
“However, the new home manager had organised meetings with people's families but, there was limited evidence of how people or their loved ones were involved in planning their care and how they would like to have their independence encouraged.
“We continue to monitor the service closely, and we’ll further use our enforcement powers if we’re not assured people are safe – or if improvements aren’t made.”
Inspectors found:
- Although people and their relatives felt safe, people were at risk of receiving unsafe care
- People's individual risks weren’t always identified, assessed and mitigated – and staff weren’t given clear guidance or information on how to protect them
- Some staff still didn’t know what to do in an emergency
- People's medicines weren’t always managed safely
- Systems to ensure safe staff recruitment weren’t in place.