Abbey Court Care Home

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• 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

Although the provider had worked to improve care for people in the service there were still areas of leadership which needed improvement. This included some quality monitoring processes and communication with staff. The provider was open and listened to feedback from our inspection team on the areas which needed improvement.

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.

Staff we spoke with were not always able to discuss the provider’s values and vision of the service. Some staff felt communication about all the changes in the service could be improved. For example, one member of staff told us the minutes from staff meetings did not always get distributed in a timely way so if they had not been able to attend the meeting they wouldn’t know what had been discussed.

The service had a poster in place to show the provider’s values. We were also sent a document which the provider shared with the service for them to identify how they would achieve goals in line with the provider’s vision and values. This included how managers would work with staff to ensure they put people first, acted with integrity, or strived for excellence. However the document was not completed so any planned goals the service was meant to undertake were not evident. This meant there was a lack of evidence to show staff were working towards the provider’s values and vision

The feedback we received from staff about the service’s managers in post was positive. Staff told us they felt they could go to their managers if they had any issues of concern. The home manager told us they had been well supported by the provider’s senior management team. They told us when they first came into post there were a number of concerns and the senior managers undertook daily teams calls to offer guidance and support and attended the site regularly.

Despite what staff told us, the processes in place to support staff were not always used effectively. The supervision matrix we were sent showed staff were meant to receive supervision every 2 month but not been supported with regular supervisions from mid-April 2024 to mid-September 2024. This meant the manager was not following the provider policy and procedures.

We did not look at Freedom to speak up during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Well-led.

We did not look at Workforce equality, diversity and inclusion during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Well-led.

The managers told us there was a quality monitoring process in place at the service and they worked with senior staff at the service to undertake audits and monitor the quality of care people received.

The quality monitoring processes we looked at showed some of the issues we found with medicines and care plans. However, on some audits we viewed, actions were not highlighted and when they were, there was no named person to carry out the actions and no proposed completion date to show when issues should addressed. This had resulted in actions not being completed. For example, we had found a lack of information on one person's care needs in their care plan. We noted this had been highlighted on an audit a month before but the issues had not been addressed.

The majority of people and relatives we spoke with were happy with the way the staff at the home communicated with them and supported them when they required hospital appointments or support with external health professionals.

We had mixed feedback from staff on how well communication at the service was managed. Staff did not always feel they were kept informed of updates on people’s care. Some staff felt feedback on issues raised at the daily flash meetings were not always brought back to staff.

We received positive feedback from visiting external health professionals who felt staff were responsive and willing to listen to guidance when they visited.

Although we saw some information to show people had been supported by external health professionals we also saw when staff had highlighted in care plans there had been changes to people’s needs, these changes were not always passed on to the relevant health professionals in a timely way.

Senior managers told us they had been aware the service had been through a difficult time over the last few months. As a result they had taken steps to provide the home manager with temporary support and were working to address the issues of concern at the service. The senior manager had brought in clinical leads for two of the units and a further clinical lead for the service. They told us they were committed to improving the care people at the service received

The processes and practices the clinical leads were planning to bring in still needed to be embedded into the service to further improve the oversight of the provider and improve people’s care. This included the management of audits staff undertook to support medicines management as noted in the safe section of this report.