Archived: Addaction - Cobbold Road

Updated 27 March 2017

Addaction Cobbold Road provides community treatment and recovery services for around 300 clients with substance misuse problems, their carers, families and friends. The service offers individual counselling and structured group support.

Staff do not provide services relating to prescribed medicines related to substance misuse. This is provided by a local NHS trust, whose staff worked on the same site. We did not inspect this part of the service in this inspection.

The service has a registered manager in place and is registered to provide the following regulated activities:

• Diagnostic and screening procedures

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury

We have inspected this service five times since 2011. The last inspection in August 2014 found the provider met the five standards of care used to inspect services at the time.

Updated 27 March 2017

We do not currently rate independent standalone substance misuse services.

We found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• Staff did not monitor and address environmental safety and hazards. Staff did not complete health and safety actions following external assessments for fire and electrical safety. The service did not have an effective system to alert the staff working in other services who shared the building about excluded clients (clients who are not allowed on the premises because of their past unacceptable behaviour with staff or other clients) or ensure people under 18 were escorted at all times.

• Volunteer staff did not have appropriate criminal record checks in place for the work they carried out. Work by volunteer staff was not reviewed.

• Recent staff leavers and a reduction in funding meant there were not enough staff for each client to have a keyworker.

• Staff did not complete detailed care records, including risk assessments, risk management plans and care plans. The team were moving to electronic records and still had work to do to ensure all information was copied over from paper records.

• The staff group did not regularly discuss incidents as a team to have the opportunity to learn from them.

However, we also found the following areas of good practice:

• Clients gave positive feedback about staff and did not have to wait long for appointments.

• Staff monitored outcomes for clients throughout treatment.

• The manager supported staff development through regular supervision. Staff attended regular team meetings and said they felt supported.

• Staff communicated with external agencies so clients could access other services when necessary.