Alice House

Updated 19 September 2024

Date of assessment 20 September 2024 to 7 October 2024. Alice House is a residential care home with 2 floors, providing the regulated activity of accommodation and personal care. The home provides care for people living with dementia. The assessment included 3 visits to the service by 3 inspectors and a pharmacist from the CQC on the 20 September, 25 September and by 2 inspectors on the 30 September 2024. An Expert by Experience accompanied us on the 25 September 2024. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service. We carried out this responsive assessment due to concerns which were shared with us by the local authority safeguarding team. At the last inspection, the service was rated good overall, but requires improvement in safe and good in well led. At this assessment, we found the service had deteriorated and now rated inadequate overall. The ratings for the quality statements we did not assess remain unchanged. We found shortfalls relating to safeguarding, staffing and recruitment, infection prevention and control, the safe management of medicines, managing risks and governance. Some statutory notifications had not been submitted to CQC as required. We issued 7 breaches of the legal regulations in relation to safe care and treatment, staffing, recruitment, medicines optimisation and good governance. In instances where CQC have decided to take civil or criminal enforcement action against a provider, we will publish this information on our website after any representations and/ or appeals have been concluded. This service is being placed in special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we user our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a timeframe within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide.

Updated 19 September 2024

Most people we spoke with were not able to give feedback on the care they received. We spoke to relatives during the assessment to gather feedback about their experience of the service and the care people received. They described staff as being kind, patient and caring. Relatives told us they had received phone calls to let them know when falls had occurred. However, we identified incidents and changes in people’s wellbeing which the service had not appropriately reported. We therefore could not be assured relatives were contacted for each incident or when people’s health needs had changed. Relatives gave feedback about staffing levels at the service. They felt that overall, there were not enough staff to care for people. Overall relatives were positive about how the service was managed, however some relatives told us they were not aware of who the registered manager was and had not met the provider. During our visit to the service, we also 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 have used the information within the report.