Updated 29 April 2015
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
This inspection took place on 15 December 2014 and was unannounced. The inspection continued through January when we spoke with families and reviewed further written information we had requested from the provider.
The inspection team included two inspectors, one of whom visited the provider’s office and one who visited the supported living house and spoke with families. There was also an expert by experience. An expert by experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.
Before this inspection we reviewed all the information we held about this service, including the service inspection history. The service was registered in June 2013 and we had carried out one previous inspection on 20 and 22 December 2013. The provider was assessed to be meeting the standards we checked at that time. We reviewed notifications sent in by the provider over the past year, complaints, safeguarding alerts and information from the local authority. Before the inspection, the provider completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make.
We used a number of different methods to help us understand the experiences of people using the service. We spent time observing care and how staff interacted with people in the supported living house with two people. We observed two mealtimes and 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 spoke to two of the four people who had been living in the supported living house. The other two people were staying with their families so we did not meet them. We spoke to the four people’s relatives to seek their views on the service.
We spoke with 8 relatives for their views on the service provided both in supported living and in the outreach service provided to people living in their family homes. We spoke with the manager, team leader and four staff members, We also spoke with the Commissioning and Safeguarding representatives from the local authority.
We looked at two people’s care records in detail. We carried out pathway tracking (where we read a person’s care plan then checked to see if staff provided the care in accordance with the care plan). We checked menus, risk assessments, six staff files, staff duty rosters, staff recruitment, training, supervision and meeting records, accident and incident records, selected policies and procedures, quality checking records and medicine administration record charts. We sent written questions to the manager, area manager and operations director following our inspection visit and received information from them afterwards which we used as part of the inspection.