We carried out a review of the data available to us about Unique Care UK on 6 July 2023. We have not found evidence that we need to carry out an inspection or reassess our rating at this stage.
This could change at any time if we receive new information. We will continue to monitor data about this service.
If you have concerns about Unique Care UK, you can give feedback on this service.
This service is a domiciliary care agency and is based in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham. The service provides personal care to adults in their own homes. 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 our inspection, the service provided personal care to 22 people.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
At our last comprehensive inspection on 22 January 2019, we found shortfalls that may place people at risk of harm. We found that risk assessments had not been completed for people to minimise the risks of avoidable harm and robust pre-employment checks had not been carried out to ensure staff can safely work with vulnerable people. During this inspection, we found improvements had been made.
Risk assessments had been carried out to ensure people received safe care. Pre-employment checks such as references had been sought to ensure staff were suitable to support people. Systems were in place to monitor staff time-keeping and rotas were sent in advance to staff to minimise missed calls and late calls.
Quality assurance systems were in place to identify shortfalls and take prompt action to ensure people always received safe care. However, improvements were required with record keeping as we found some gaps in people’s medicines records and staff files. We have made a recommendation about this.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection and update
The previous rating for this service was requires improvement (published 9 March 2019) and there were breaches of regulation. CQC had issued requirement notices for Regulation 19 (Fit and Proper Persons) and Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014.
Why we inspected
We undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led to check if the service was compliant with the requirement notices issued at the last comprehensive inspection and to see if improvements had been made.
No areas of concern were identified in the other key questions. We therefore did not inspect them. Ratings from previous inspections for those key questions were used in calculating the overall rating at this inspection.
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 inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Unique Care UK on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service until we return to visit as per our re-inspection programme. If we receive any concerning information we may inspect sooner.