Archived: Kents Hill Care Home

Updated 9 July 2016

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.

We undertook an unannounced focused inspection of Kents Hill Care Home on 15 June 2016. This inspection was carried out to check that improvements to meet legal requirements planned by the provider after our 10 February 2016 comprehensive inspection had been made. We inspected the service against two of the five questions we ask about services: Is the service safe and caring. This is because the service was not meeting some legal requirements within these questions.

The inspection team comprised of one inspector.

Before this inspection we reviewed all the information we held about the service, including data about safeguarding and statutory notifications. Statutory notifications are information about important events which the provider is required to send us by law. We spoke with the local authority to gain their feedback as to the care that people received. We also reviewed the report from our previous inspection.

During the inspection we spoke with the registered manager and deputy manager about the improvements they had implemented following our previous inspection. We also spoke with eight people living at the service, a team leader and a carer, to get their views on the service.

In addition we reviewed documentation held at the service, to corroborate our findings. This included medication records for 15 people living at the service and documentation relating to the management of the service.

Updated 9 July 2016

We carried out an unannounced comprehensive inspection of this service on 10 February 2016, during which breaches of legal requirements were found. We found that people's medication was not always managed and fully documented and did not demonstrate that people's medication was safely administered. We also found that responses to people's individual call-bells were not always fast enough, which meant they did not always receive the care and support they required.

We asked the provider to submit an action plan to tell us how they would meet these regulations in the future; they stated that they would be meeting them by 31 May 2016. During this inspection we returned to see if the service had made the improvements they stated in their action plan. We found that the provider was now meeting these regulations.

We undertook this focused inspection on 15 June 2016 to check that they had followed their plan and to confirm that they now met legal requirements. This report only covers our findings in relation to those requirements. You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for Kents Hill Care Home on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Kents Hill Care Home is based in a residential area of Milton Keynes and provides nursing and personal care for older people, who may be living with dementia. The service is registered to provide care for up to 75 people, on the day of our inspection there were 60 people living there.

The service had a registered manager. 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 legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Improvements had been made to the systems for medication management and documentation. The registered manager had made sure that people's medication records had photographs and information to guide staff. In addition, they had implemented checks and audits to monitor the administration of medication and identify areas for improvement.

The provider had also made improvements regarding response times to people's call-bells. There had been changes made to staff deployment within the service and the system for when staff took their breaks to help ensure busy times were covered by staff. Audits were carried out to review staff responses to call-bells, to ensure people's needs were met in a timely manner.