About the service Apex Prime Care - Newhaven is a domiciliary care service providing personal care to people in their own homes. The service provides support to older people, people with mental health conditions, people living with dementia and physical disabilities. At the time of our inspection there were 77 people using the service.
Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
People, staff and relatives were positive about the management of the service and felt involved and listened to by the registered manager. Some quality assurance processes were effective in identifying areas for improvement and showed actions taken as a result of issues identified. However other aspects of quality assurance such as risk assessments and documents relating to medicines required improvement.
People received safe care and support from staff that knew them well. People and relatives we spoke to told us there were enough staff to support people. Staff understood how to keep people safe and how to raise concerns about people's safety. Risks to people were safely managed but some people's care plans needed more detailed guidance around risks.
People were supported to receive their medicines by staff that had been trained to administer them. However, further consideration was needed to how people received their medicines that were taken on an as and when needed (PRN) basis.
Staff wore appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) when supporting people and followed infection prevention and control procedures.
The culture of the service was person-centred, and people told us that staff supported them to increase their independence. Health professionals that regularly worked with the service were positive about staff's involvement and support of people. People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; the policies and systems in the service supported this practice.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection
The last rating for this service was good (published 30 August 2017).
Why we inspected
This inspection was prompted by a review of the information we held about this service. We carried out a focused inspection of the key questions safe and well led to check the rating of the service remained accurate. For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Apex Prime Care - Newhaven on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.