Updated 2 November 2018
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection checked 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 was a comprehensive inspection which took place on 20 September 2018 and was unannounced. The membership of the inspection team comprised of one inspector.
When planning our inspection we looked at the information we held about the service. This included notifications received from the provider about deaths, accidents/incidents and safeguarding alerts, which they are required to send us by law. Before the inspection, the provider completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asked the provider to give some key information about the service, what the services does well and improvements they plan to make. We also contacted the Local Authority commissioning service for any relevant information they may have to support our inspection. We also contacted the Health Watch Birmingham who provide information on care services.
During our visit to the provider we met with four people who use the service and spoke to four relatives, three members of care staff, a health care professional and the registered manager. Many of the people had limited verbal communication and were not always able to tell us how they found living at the home. People who could not communicate verbally used other methods of communication, for example; gestures. We saw how staff supported people throughout the inspection to help us understand peoples’ experience of living at the home.
We looked at the care records of three people and three staff files as well as the medicine management processes and records that were maintained by the provider about recruitment and staff training. We also looked at records relating to the management of the service and a selection of the service’s policies and procedures to check people received a quality service. We also carried out a Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI), which is an observational tool used to help us collect evidence about the experience of people who use services, especially where people were not able to tell us verbally.