5 May 2011
During an inspection in response to concerns
When speaking to people receiving the service it was generally agreed that staff had the necessary skills to meet peoples needs.
As part of our review of this service we wished to gain the views of staff employed by the agency. To achieve this we left our contact details with the manager and asked them to forward the information to their staff team. Unfortunately we received a poor response from the staff team and this has made it difficult to make a sound judgement about the staff team.
Some of the comments we received included; "Probably as a result of staffing problems and the fact that we do not keep service users long term, we (Home Support Workers) tend not to have a regular round of service users. The downside to this is that the service users very frequently ask who will be in the next day and also say that "we never know who is coming in". We often cannot answer them, as we do not know either".
Some of the comments we received from people using the service included; "The staff are worth their weight in gold", "I'm very, very pleased", "They help me maintain a good quality of life", "If I was unhappy with the service I would just call the office", "I would recommend them to others", "They are quite friendly", "The quality did vary".
Other comments received from staff included; "There is usually good support from line managers and they encourage us to phone in with any concerns, but there have been lots of changes to staff in the office and it is not always possible to get hold of the person we need to speak to", "Morale is generally very low".
As we stated it is difficult for us to make a judgement about these comments due to the poor response rate of the staff team.