About the service Cherish UK Ltd is a domiciliary care agency. 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. At the time of the inspection the service was providing personal care to 120 people.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
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.
We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ is the guidance CQC follows to make assessments and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it. We considered this guidance as there were people using the service who have a learning disability and or who are autistic.
Right Support: People were supported within their own homes, and for some people, in the wider community. Promoting and maintaining people’s choice and independence was important to all staff we spoke with.
Right Care: Managers and staff placed great importance on providing person centred care and support, that was based on what was important to and for the person.
Right Culture: There was a culture of compassion and respect for people who used the service. Staff spoke about people in caring and kind ways.
We found improvements had been made and there was an ongoing programme of recruitment, but we received mixed feedback from people about staffing and call timings. The provider had introduced an electronic system which alerted managers to any late or missed calls. Electronic records indicated calls were usually within allowances of commissioned care. Staff told us calls were well organised and they had sufficient time to provide people with the care and support they needed. Staff training now included some condition specific training relevant to the needs of people staff were supporting. This was still being developed further to reflect individuals conditions and needs. All required checks had been undertaken prior to staff commencing employment. Staff had received training in safeguarding people from abuse and medicines administration. Risks to individuals, staff and within people’s homes were identified and well managed.
The service was well managed. There was a range of detailed quality monitoring, auditing and oversight. Senior managers for the provider had oversight of the service and all quality monitoring. The registered manager and operations manager told us told us they would seek people’s views about issues raised during our inspection regarding staff deployment and consistency. Staff were very positive about the registered manager and working for the service. There was an appropriate system in place to manage complaints raised. Statutory notifications are reports of certain changes, events and incidents that the registered providers must notify us about that affect their service or the people who use it. Notifications to CQC had been made as required.
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 requires improvement (published 19 June 2021).
At our last inspection we recommended that the provider consider condition specific training, continued to review staffing levels and staff deployment and reviewed audit processes to ensure they were robust and identified areas for improvement. At this inspection we found the provider had acted on any recommendations and improvements had been made. However, we have made a recommendation about gathering and responding to people’s feedback about their experiences of the service provided.
Why we inspected
We undertook this focused inspection to check the provider had acted on our recommendations and to confirm they met legal requirements. This report only covers our findings in relation to the Key Questions of Safe and Well-led which contain those requirements. For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating. The overall rating for the service has changed from requires improvement to good. This is based on the findings at this inspection.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Cherish UK Ltd 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.