About the service Next Steps is a domiciliary and supported living service providing personal care to nine people across seven properties at the time of the inspection. The service supports people with learning disabilities, autism, mental health and physical disabilities.
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.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
The provider and manager had not followed government guidance for the management of COVID-19 in relation to regular staff testing.
Staff had received training in infection control and demonstrated an understanding of what personal protective equipment (PPE) should be used when supporting people.
Quality monitoring systems needed strengthening to ensure that care plans and risk assessments contained all the required information for staff to follow to maintain people’s safety.
Monitoring of people’s daily records required improvement to ensure that staff are recording care provided as per people’s care plans and risk assessments.
People were protected from abuse and relatives told us their loved ones received safe care.
People received support from a regular staff team and staff were recruited safely.
Staff were trained in administering medicines safely. Competency checks had been completed to ensure staff were following safe practices.
People’s relatives spoke positively about the staff and felt people were encouraged to gain new skills and independence.
People were supported to remain in contact with their loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic by phone calls, videos calls and social distanced meets.
Quality monitoring of accidents and incidents ensured that information and learning was shared with staff to reduce the risk of future occurrences.
We expect health and social care providers to guarantee autistic people and people with a learning disability the choices, dignity, 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 providing support to people with a learning disability and/or autistic people.
The service was able to demonstrate how they were the underpinning principles of Right support, right care, right culture. People’s care was person centred and focussed on developing independence with recorded goals on how to achieve this.
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 good (published 09 March 2020).
Why we inspected
We received concerns in relation to the management of medicines and people’s finances. We also received some concerns about staff training and management oversight. As a result, we undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led only.
We reviewed the information we held about the service. No areas of concern were identified in the other key questions. We therefore did not inspect them. Ratings from previous comprehensive inspections for those key questions were used in calculating the overall rating at this inspection.
We found no evidence during this inspection that people were at risk of harm from this concern. Please see the safe and well-led sections of this full report.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Next Steps Ltd 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.