St Joseph's Nursing Home provides nursing and personal care for up to 50 people. The home also provides end of life and palliative care. At the time of our inspection there were 46 people living in the home.
We found equipment used by staff when providing care and support was well maintained and safe. The environment in communal areas and individual bedrooms was also well maintained and clean. However, some areas throughout the home required improvement. These included one of the sluice rooms with areas of damaged tiling that could increase the risks of spreading infection and a bathroom that was not useable because the bath was boarded up. There was insufficient space to manoeuvre equipment safely to support people with mobilityneeds.
Further improvements were also needed to the two areas of multiple occupancy, which were referred to as wards. These areas lacked individuality and did not reflect people’s individual tastes. As the two wards contained beds separated by curtains there were also risks to people’s privacy and dignity when receiving care and support in areas that were open to people walking through. You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.
There were processes in place to provide staff with the training needed to give them the knowledge to care for people effectively. However, we found that some staff needed training updates for some core training.
People who lived in the home and their relatives told us they felt safe in the home and we saw there were systems and processes in place to protect people from the risk of harm.
We saw positive interactions between staff and people living in the home and saw that staff were kind and respectful to people when providing care and support.
The Care Quality Commission is required by law to monitor the operation of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) and to report on what we find. DoLS are a code of practice to supplement the main MCA 2005 code of practice. We looked at whether the service was applying DoLS appropriately and found they were meeting the requirements of the code.
Relatives told us that there was effective communication and staff kept them up to date with information about their family members.
Staff were knowledgeable about people’s needs and provided effective care. Care plans did not always contain enough information about people’s preferences and did not reflect the detailed knowledge demonstrated by staff.
People living in the home and their relatives told us that staff were kind, caring and cheerful. There were sufficient staff to support people with their care needs as well as social activities.
The acting manager had not been in the role of manager for long and we identified a number of areas for improvement which needed to be addressed.