Archived: Castleford Lodge

Langtree Park Nursing Home provides accommodation and nursing care for up to 60 older people some of whom may be living with dementia and other mental illnesses. There were 37 people living at the home on the day of our inspection. The accommodation is arranged over two floors with the dementia unit on the first floor and the nursing unit on the ground floor. There is a passenger lift operating between the two floors.

There was a registered manager for this service but they were not working at the service providing day to day support. There was an acting manager who had applied to be registered as the 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 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Staff had received training in how to keep people safe. All the staff we spoke with demonstrated they understood how to ensure people were safeguarded against abuse and they knew the procedure to follow to report any safeguarding incidents.

There had been an issue with a high use of temporary staff at the service, but they had recently recruited to all care staff posts and were in the process of recruiting to the vacant nursing posts.

Risk in some areas such as pressure management was well recorded. Risks around the use of assistive equipment such as wheelchairs, bathing equipment, shower chairs and specialist seating systems was not always recorded to ensure identified risks were reduced to the lowest possible level.

We found some medicines were on the whole stored and administered safely. However, we did find some examples of poor practice. This included around the administration of covert medicines to four people which was not in accordance with the Mental Capacity Act 2005. This breached the regulation around safe care and treatment.

We found detailed capacity assessments had been carried out for people living in the dementia unit which were compliant with the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards had been appropriately applied for and authorisations were in place or awaiting authorisation by the relevant body.

People were supported to eat their meals by care staff appropriately and sensitively and people told us how much they enjoyed their meals. People’s nutritional and hydration needs were met, although this was not always recorded in detail. However, the service was in the process of making improvements in this area.

We found all the staff to be caring in their approach to the people who lived there and treated people with dignity and respect. We observed staff to be kind and compassionate throughout our inspection.

People were offered choice in how they wanted to be supported and families felt involved in the care provided to their relatives. The service was in the process of transferring care files to the registered provider’s system of recording. We found some had been completed well and detailed each area of people’s support needs. Work was on-going to ensure all care plans were updated as not all the care plans we looked at were fully completed.

Complaints were handled appropriately and people were happy that any concerns raised had been acted upon.

The home had recently been taken over by a new registered provider. As a result the home had received intense support from the operations manager and an acting manager who were providing strong and present leadership and management support to the service. Improvements were evident but it was too early to determine whether these improvements would be sustained.

You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.