Anglia Care

Updated 15 July 2023

The inspection

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (the Act) as part of our regulatory functions. We checked whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Act. We looked at the overall quality of the service and provided a rating for the service under the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

Inspection team

The inspection was undertaken by one inspector.

Service and service type

This service is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to people living in their own houses and flats.

Registered Manager

This provider is required to have a registered manager to oversee the delivery of regulated activities at this location. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Registered managers and providers are legally responsible for how the service is run, for the quality and safety of the care provided and compliance with regulations.

At the time of our inspection there was not a registered manager in post. There was a manager in post, they had not yet submitted their application to register.

Notice of inspection

We gave the service 24 hours’ notice of the inspection. This was because we needed to be sure someone would be in the office to support the inspection, due to there not being a registered manager in post.

Inspection activity started on 7 June 2023 and ended on 23 June 2023. We visited the location’s office on 7 June 2023.

What we did before the inspection

We used information gathered as part of monitoring activity that took place on 25 May 2023 to help plan the inspection and inform our judgements.

We reviewed information we had received about the service since the last inspection. We sought feedback from the local authority and professionals who work with the service. We used the information the provider sent us in the provider information return (PIR). This is information providers are required to send us annually with key information about their service, what they do well, and improvements they plan to make. We used all this information to plan our inspection.

During the inspection

During our visit to the office, we spoke with the manager, office manager, and the training and recruitment manager. We reviewed records including 6 staff personnel and recruitment files, care plan audits, safeguarding records, medicine audits and error logs.

Following our visit to the location’s office, we used electronic file sharing to enable us to review documentation. This included the care and medicines records of 5 people who used the service, records relating to care visits undertaken and policies and procedures. We received electronic feedback from a person who used the service, a relative and 11 staff members, including care and senior care staff. We also spoke with 9 people who used the service, 12 relatives and 3 members of care staff on the telephone.

We fed back our findings of the inspection via video call on 23 June 2023 to the office manager and manager.

Updated 15 July 2023

About the service

Anglia Care is a domiciliary care service providing personal care to people living in their own homes. The service provides support to adults.

Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. At the time of our inspection there were 109 people receiving the regulated activity of personal care.

People’s experience of using this service and what we found

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee autistic people and people with a learning disability the choices, dignity, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. Right support, right care, right culture is the statutory guidance which supports CQC to make assessments and judgements about services providing support to people with a learning disability and/or autistic people. We considered this guidance as there were people using the service who have a learning disability and or who are autistic.

There had been recent changes in the management of the service. The provider and management team had identified areas for improvement, but these had not yet been fully implemented or embedded in practice. The systems in place for monitoring and assessing the service were not fully established to ensure shortfalls were identified and addressed in a timely way. This included the lack of documented actions taken to show how shortfalls in staff practice, recording and feedback received was addressed.

Records relating to people’s care and support required improvement, there were inconsistencies and some information out of date. To address the shortfalls, a new electronic care planning system was being rolled out and all people’s care needs were being reviewed and documented.

The systems to plan people’s care visits needed improvement to ensure they were managed to support staff with time to travel between visits and stay for the planned amount of time. We received feedback from people and relatives that staff were not always skilled to support them in the way they needed and preferred.

There were systems in place to reduce the risks of abuse and avoidable harm. Support provided with medicines was monitored and actions taken where discrepancies were identified. Staff received training in infection control and processes were in place to monitor staff.

People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; the policies and systems in the service supported this practice.

For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk

Rating at last inspection

The last rating for this service was good (published 29 September 2017).

Why we inspected

This inspection was prompted by a review of the information we held about this service.

We received concerns in relation to the care provided, medicines management and visit times. As a result, we undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led only. For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating.

The overall rating for the service has changed from good to requires improvement based on the findings of this inspection. We have found evidence that the provider needs to make improvements. Please see the safe and well-led sections of this full report.

You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Anglia Care on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Enforcement

We have identified breaches in relation to deployment of staff and governance at this inspection. Please see the action we have told the provider to take at the end of this report.

Follow up

We will request an action plan from the provider to understand what they will do to improve the standards of quality and safety. We will work alongside the provider and local authority to monitor progress. We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.