Archived: Appletree Care Home

Updated 23 September 2015

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

We undertook a focused inspection of Appletree  Care home on 11 August 2015. This inspection was to check that improvements to meet legal requirements planned by the provider after our comprehensive inspection of 16 January 2015 had been made.

We inspected the service against two  of the five questions we ask about services: is the service safe and effective? This is because the service was not meeting legal requirements in relation to these questions.

The inspection was undertaken by two inspectors and an expert by experience. An expert by experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.

Before our inspection we reviewed the information we held about the home, this included the provider’s action plan, which set out the action they would take to meet legal requirements.

We used a number of different methods to help us understand the experiences of people living in the service. We spent time observing care in the communal areas such as the lounge and dining area and met with some people in their rooms. We used the Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI). SOFI is a way of observing care to help us understand the experience of people who could not talk with us.

We spoke with nine people who used the service, five relatives, the registered manager, the activities coordinator, three registered nurses and seven care workers. At the visit we looked at staffing rotas, dependency levels and a number of audits, we also reviewed records for 40 people who had been a subject of a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard assessment.

Updated 23 September 2015

We carried out an unannounced comprehensive inspection of this service on 16 January 2015 at which two breaches of legal requirements were found. The registered provider had not made appropriate Deprivation of Liberty (DoLS) applications for people who lacked capacity to make decisions and we found that there was not a sufficient number of staff available to meet people’s needs.

After the comprehensive inspection, the provider wrote to us to say what they would do to meet legal requirements in relation to these breaches.

We undertook a focused inspection on 11 August 2015 to check that they had followed their plan and to confirm that they now met legal requirements.

This report only covers our findings in relation to these topics. You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for Appletree Care home on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Appletree Care Home provides accommodation, nursing and personal care for up to 77 older people, the majority of whom have dementia. The third floor supports people with residential care needs and the first floor and second floor supports people who also have nursing needs. On the day of our visit there were 70 people living in the home.

The home has a registered manager. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

At our focused inspection on 11 August 2015, we found that the provider had followed their plan and legal requirements had been met.

We found that the provider had employed additional care and nursing staff and staff had been deployed appropriately to meet people’s needs.

We found that that appropriate DoLS applications had been made for all people using the service who lacked capacity to consent to remaining in the home.