Errand Plus and Personal Services

On this page

• Overview
• Shared direction and culture
• Capable, compassionate and inclusive leaders
• Freedom to speak up
• Workforce equality, diversity and inclusion
• Governance, management and sustainability
• Partnerships and communities
• Learning, improvement and innovation

We had several concerns around the governance of the service. We were not assured the processes were embedded or robust. We had acknowledged the service had implemented a number of improvements since the last local authority assessment was carried out, however there was a number of areas which required further improvements to prevent people from being at risk of harm and to ensure the service had clear oversight of the shortfalls within the service.

This service scored 57 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Everyone we spoke with felt the service had a good shared direction and culture and felt valued. They expressed that they had monthly meetings and had spot checks carried out once a month and they felt supported.

The service carried out a monthly business plan which discussed some basic areas around lessons learnt for that month and people leaving the service. There was no evidence of the staff that attended these business plans and no evidence of them putting ideas forward. We were not assured these were reviewed regularly with the whole staff force. This made us question how the service was assured that all staff were aware of the business plan and actions to be implemented following it, when they could not evidence which staff had attended and those that had not.

The staff felt they were supported and anytime they had concerns these were always addressed and someone was available at the end of the phone day and night. They felt they were given the opportunity to develop and any training they felt they needed they were offered although we were not assured with this as the Registered Manager felt they only had to provide mandatory training and this did not assure us that staff were trained to appropriately meet the needs of peoples they supported.

The manager was undertaking an accredited qualification to support him with his position within the service to ensure that he had the required expertise to carry out the role as Registered Manager. He was doing this alongside managing the service day to day. The service has been open in discussion and honest and have demonstrated their willingness to continuously learn and improve. We feel the service are still embedding new processes but they are also lacking in some areas which would give a good oversight and enable them to measure the effectiveness of how the service is performing, thus driving improvement.

All staff could explain the whistleblowing policy and knew the process and they all expressed that when they did have concerns they escalated these concerns to management.

The service has a whistleblowing policy and it recorded all relevant contact details within the policy. Staff said they has access to this. However the service had no evidence of staff raising concerns to them and what action they took following these concerns. Speaking to staff and reviewing meeting minutes we can see concerns had been raised and staff felt confident they were resolved but the service could not evidence any to us.

The service expressed how they support staff to the best of their ability and try to work around their personal commitments where they can. The staff felt they were supported well by the service.

Although the staff have expressed, they felt supported by the service and we have seen evidence of feedback from the staff there was no evidence of improvement plans from their feedback and what the service had done. This does not assure us that the service builds on feedback from the team.

Talking to the staff they assured us they understand their requirements under GDPR and their responsibility to report and raise concerns. They knew the management structure and escalation process if they were unsure on anything. However, we were not assured that their management structure was clear to people using the service or their families.

The service lacked robust audits and the audits that they did have in place where inadequate and failed to identify the short falls. These were also not picked up on by leaders within the service. The organisational structure was poor and had no names recorded on it. There was lack of good record keeping and this was evidenced through the failure of CQC notifications not being submitted when required.

People expressed they were supported from the staff to speak to the GP or nurses when needed.

The staff said they felt they had a good working relationship with the healthcare professionals and individual family members and felt they all worked towards providing good care for people within the service

The service was open and responsive when they had complaints raised to them from healthcare professionals. Wearing face masks as a communication barrier was a complaint we had heard echoed throughout our assessment.

There service had no evidence of shared learnings with external healthcare professionals.

Speaking to the registered manager he seemed to understand the needs for learning and improvement however we were not assured that this was to the fullest potential. All Lessons learnt had been from complaints, no lessons had been learnt from processes such as internal audits or when accident or incidents had occurred. We did not see sufficient evidence to confirm the service was capturing and embedding all areas of improvement to their fullest potential.

We were not assured that the service made sure the whole work force were aware of the learning or improvements that were being introduced into the setting on a regular basis. This evidenced to us that the service did not have clear oversight and that they could not be confident in knowing that the staff were updated on the learning, improvement and innovations that were being implemented on a frequent basis.