- Homecare service
Lifeways Community Care (Swindon)
Report from 15 September 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment 1 October 2024 to 13 January 2025. The assessment was carried out to check whether the Warning Notices issued at our last assessment had been met. We found the service had made some improvements and the provider was no longer in breach of regulations. We looked at 7 quality statements related to safe and well led. Lifeways Community Care (Swindon) is part of a national organisation which provides care to people with learning disabilities living in different communities. We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and 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 supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it. We found the model of care was not always in line with current best practice guidance right support, right care, and right culture. Some staff still raised concerns about day-to-day support for new members of staff and told us this affected the planning for people accessing activities they enjoyed. We found the service was not following best practice guidelines in relation to storing medicines in supported living accommodation. Although the service had increased management support available since our last assessment, this was not yet fully embedded. The provider was taking steps to address this through training and development opportunities for new managers. However, people were now being appropriately safeguarded, and there were enough staff to support people. The service had introduced new initiatives since the last assessment, such as adapting the digital system to ensure prompts were available to investigate safeguarding incidents and manage audits.
People's experience of this service
Evidence was gathered on-site by observing and talking with people. Feedback was also gained from people’s relatives off-site. We observed people to be safe and relatives told us they felt their family members were safe and well-looked after by staff. People were engaged in various activities and being supported to access the community. Relatives told us people were supported safely with medicines and provided positive feedback about the management. However, some relatives also raised concerns about the number of changes in management in some of the services.