Updated 1 February 2017
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 was 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.
We undertook a focused inspection of Birch Court on 7 October 2016. The inspection was unannounced. We carried out this inspection in response to anonymous concerns about the staffing levels especially in one specific unit of the home.
We inspected the service against one of the five questions we ask about services: is the service safe and responsive to individual need.
The inspection was undertaken by one adult social care inspector.
Before the inspection we checked with the local authority safeguarding and commissioning teams for any information they held about the service. We considered this together with any information held by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) such as notifications of important incidents or changes to registration. A notification is information about important events which the service is required to send to us by law. We used all this information to decide which areas to focus on during our inspection.
During the inspection we met with six of the people who used the service. People were not always able to communicate verbally with us but expressed themselves in other ways such as by gesture or expression. Due to the nature of people’s complex needs, we did not always ask direct questions. We did however chat with people and observed them as they engaged with staff during their day to day activities. We spoke with six staff members as well as the newly appointed manager, area manager and the clinical lead.
We received information from Warrington Council about the outcome of their recent contracts monitoring visits. The information they shared with us indicated that they had found evidence that the service had made some improvements in the areas they looked at.
We looked at records including three care files, staffing rotas, the training matrix, accident and incident reports, complaints and audit reports.
We had discussions with the area manager, newly appointed manager who had been in post for two weeks and the clinical lead. They were able to share information and provide documentation to demonstrate how they had addressed the areas of concern previously identified by The Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Warrington Council.
We also looked around the building and facilities and, by invitation, looked in people’s bedrooms.