Archived: Clarendon Manor

Updated 23 March 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 11February 2015 and was unannounced.

The inspection team consisted of two inspectors and an expert by experience. The expert by experience was a person who had personal experience of caring for someone who had similar care needs.

Before the inspection we reviewed the information we held about the service. We looked at information received from relatives and other agencies involved in people’s care. We also looked at the statutory notifications the manager had sent us. A statutory notification is information about important events which the provider is required to send to us by law. We also contacted the local authority contract monitoring officer who had no concerns about the service.

We reviewed the information in the provider’s information return (The PIR). This is a form we asked the provider to send to us before we visited. The PIR asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. We found the information in the PIR was an accurate assessment of how the home operated.

Not all the people living in the home were able to give us their views and opinions about how they were cared for, as some had varying levels of memory loss or dementia. We spent time talking to people and observing care in the lounge and communal areas. 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 with seven people who lived at Clarendon Manor and two relatives. We also spoke with a senior carer, four care staff, the chef and the registered manager.

We looked at a range of records about people’s care and how the home was managed. We looked at care records for four people to see how they were cared for and supported. We looked at other records related to people’s care including medication records, the services’ quality assurance audits, records of complaints, and incidents and accidents at the home.

Updated 23 March 2015

This inspection took place on the 11 February 2015 and was unannounced.

Clarendon Manor is registered to provide accommodation and personal care for a maximum of 36 older people. On the day of our visit there were 26 people living at the home.

A registered manager was in post. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

People told us they felt safe living at Clarendon Manor and staff understood their responsibilities around keeping people safe. There were systems and processes in place to protect people from the risk of harm. These included a procedure to manage identified risks to people’s care and an effective procedure for managing people’s medicines. There were enough suitably trained and experienced staff to meet people’s needs. Staff received training in areas considered essential to meet people’s needs safely and consistently.

Staff understood about consent and where people had capacity to make decisions, staff respected decisions people had made. The registered manager understood their responsibility to comply with the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA), but we found capacity assessments and best interest decisions had not been consistently implemented in the home.

Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, DoLS, ensures people’s freedoms and liberties are not unlawfully restricted. The registered manager understood their legal obligations in regard of DoLS. They were in the process of making applications to the local authority to make sure people who lacked capacity continued to live their lives safely and in the least restrictive way.

Staff were respectful and friendly in their approach to people. There was a consistent staff team that enabled people to build relationships and friendships with staff. People were given choices about how they wanted to spend their day so they were able to retain some independence in their everyday life. Family and friends were able to visit when they wished and there were a range of things for people to do during the day to provide stimulation and promote wellbeing. Staff understood people’s healthcare needs and people were supported by external healthcare professionals to ensure their needs were fully met.

People who lived at the home, relatives and care staff said the home was well managed. There was an experienced management team in place and staff felt supported by the registered manager and senior staff. Staff told us they were listened to and would not hesitate to raise any concerns with the manager.

There were systems in place to assess and monitor the quality of the service. This was through feedback from people who used the service, their relatives, staff meetings and a programme of checks and audits.