Background to this inspection
Updated
26 April 2017
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
This inspection took place on 1 March 2017 and was an announced inspection. The provider was given 48 hours’ notice because the location provides a domiciliary care service and we needed to be sure that someone would be in. The inspection team comprised of one inspector and an Expert by Experience. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using, or caring for someone who uses, this type of care service.
As part of the inspection we looked at previous inspection reports and checked the information that we hold about the service. This included notifications from the provider that they are required to send us by law, safeguarding alerts and information from local authorities. A Provider Information Return (PIR) request had also been sent to the provider and returned back in November 2016 which we used to inform our last inspection. A PIR is a pre-inspection questionnaire that we send to providers to help us to plan our inspection. It asks providers to give us some key information about the service, what the service does well and any improvements they plan to make.
During our inspection we spoke with 12 people who used the service and five relatives, three care staff, the registered manager, the deputy care manager as well as a member of the learning and development team.
We looked at the care records of five people to check on how their care had been planned, reviewed and recorded, which included the medicine administration processes. We also looked at four staff files to check the provider was adhering to safe recruitment practices as well as at records maintained by the provider about the quality of the service. These included records kept in relation to call monitoring processes, accidents and incidents, staff training as well as compliments and complaints.
Updated
26 April 2017
This inspection took place on 1 March 2017 and was an announced inspection. When we completed an unannounced comprehensive inspection of this service in December 2015 we found there was a breach in the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008. The provider had not ensured that people using the service were kept safe because there was not always enough staff to cover home care calls and people did not always receive the care they needed when they required it. We also found that some of the management systems in place to assess and monitor the quality and safety of the service were not always used effectively to identify and manage the risks to people, nor were there any evidence of effective management plans in place to reduce these risks re-occurring in the future. The provider also failed to maintain robust and effective record keeping systems and inconsistencies within the management of the service meant that some staff did not always feel well informed of changes.
We served warning notices against the provider in relation to the breaches of regulations 12 and 17 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. We asked them to send us an action plan to show how they would meet the legal requirements of the regulations and gave them three months to demonstrate their compliance. We undertook a focused inspection in March 2016 to check the provider had followed their plan and monitored their compliance with the legal requirements of the regulations. We found that improvements had been made which meant that the provider had met the requirements of the Warning notices and were compliant with the legal requirements of the regulations.
This inspection was carried out to check that the improvements made had been sustained and that the provider continued to meet the requirements of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (regulated Activities) Regulations 2014.
Allied Health Care Sutton Coldfield is a Domiciliary Care Service which is registered to provide personal care to people in their homes. We were told that since our last inspection in December 2015 the Solihull and Birmingham branches had merged in to the Sutton Coldfield branch and all services were now being run from this location. However, the provider was due to cease contracts with the local authority in Solihull. At the time of our inspection Allied Health Care Sutton Coldfield was providing care and support to 85 people.
Allied Health Care Sutton Coldfield is required to have a register manager in post. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have a legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run. A registered manager was in post at the time of our inspection.
People were supported by enough members of staff who had the knowledge and skills they required to care for people safely and effectively. This included the safe management of medicines so that people received their medicines as prescribed. The provider had continued to recruit new staff and improvements had been made to the deployment of staff to ensure home care calls were covered reliably.
People were protected from the risk of abuse and avoidable harm because staff received training and understood the different types of abuse and knew what actions were needed to keep people safe. The provider had also ensured effective systems were in place to report and investigate any concerns raised, which included working collaboratively with external agencies.
People were supported by staff that were kind, caring and respectful. People were encouraged to be as independent as possible and were supported to have food that they enjoyed.
Most people knew how to complain if they were unhappy and improvements had been made so that people were now more confident that their concerns would be responded to.
The provider had some management systems in place to assess and monitor the quality of the service provided to people. However, changes within the leadership structure meant that these had not always identified some of the shortfalls we found within the inspection. The registered manager was open and honest in their communication with us and recognised that further improvements were required in this area.