Updated 27 February 2019
Tesito House opened in March 2017 in the Ardwick district of Manchester, as a 24-bedded, high dependency, treatment and mental health recovery centre for women from the city. The service aim was to provide treatment and support for adult women with complex mental health problems by supporting and developing their skills, working through their rehabilitation and recovery pathway in a safe and comfortable environment. It was managed by Alternative Futures Group Limited. Tesito House at the time of inspection was registered for the following regulated activities:
- assessment or medical treatment for persons detained under the Mental Health Act 1983
- diagnostic and screening procedures
- treatment of disease, disorder or injury.
The service is developed around a patient’s prospective rehabilitation journey through the service’s three distinct eight-bedded clinical units. These were named after well-known local personalities. The admissions ward, Carol Ann Duffy ward, was the stabilisation ward. The recovery and therapy ward was Erinma Bell ward. The step-down unit, Marie Stopes, was made up of a series of eight self-contained apartments.
The Care Quality Commission last carried out a comprehensive inspection of this service in March 2018. At this inspection, we rated the service as ‘inadequate’ overall with ratings of inadequate for safe, effective and well led key questions and requires improvement for caring and responsive key questions. Following the inspection, we placed the service into special measures. Since then, the service had not been accepting any further admissions.
Services placed in special measures will be inspected again within six months. If insufficient improvements have been made such that there remains a rating of inadequate overall or for any key question or core service, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures to begin the process of preventing the provider from operating the service. This will lead to cancelling their registration or to varying the terms of their registration within six months if they do not improve. The service will be kept under review and, if needed, could be escalated to urgent enforcement action. Where necessary another inspection will be conducted within a further six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to vary the provider’s registration to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.
At the March 2018 inspection, it was found that the provider was in breach of two regulations of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. We took regulatory action in line with our enforcement powers by issuing warning notices in relation to:
- Regulation 12; safe care and treatment because the service did not have appropriate management plans in place for managing risk to all individual patients.
- Regulation 17; good governance; because the systems and process in place did not ensure the provider could assess, monitor and improve the quality of care and treatment it delivered. Not all patients had an up to date care plan or physical health monitoring, and all patients did not have the correct legal documentation attached to their medication records.
We also issued four requirement notices advising the provider of a number of improvements we required it to make.
During this inspection it was found that some of the regulatory breaches identified during the last inspection had been addressed. However, a number of breaches and areas for improvement which we had also highlighted at the time of that inspection continued to be reviewed and developed by the service.
At the time of the inspection there were eight patients at the service of whom seven were detained under the Mental Health Act and one was an informal patient. Tesito House works in partnership with the local NHS Trust who provide Mental Health Act administrative support, therapy and pharmacy support, the consultant psychiatrist and the out of hours service.