Charnwood Care Home

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• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

We assessed all quality statements in the caring key question and found areas of concern. People did not consistently receive kind and caring support. Staff explained that the staff team was not effective, so sometimes a second staff member would realise support had not been offered and then provide the care. People were not treated as individuals, and information had not been gathered on what was important to them. Staff reported low wellbeing in their roles.

This service scored 30 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Most people and relatives felt that staff were kind to them. However, people also reported that care could be rushed and staff were not always pro-active in offering support.

Staff explained that some staff were more pro-active than others. This meant that sometimes a second staff member would ensure a person was well cared for. One staff member said “I saw someone was not shaved. They like to be shaved. When I went over, he immediately complained it wasn’t offered.” Another staff member explained that care was rushed. They said, “I personally feel that the care has gone downhill and no one is properly cared for. No one has proper washes or being shaved.”

We received no feedback from partners in this area

We saw staff interactions were kind, however interactions mostly focused on completing care tasks rather than engaging on a social level. For example, staff would briefly talk to people to ask if they wanted a drink. However, staff did not take time to sit with people.

People were not always treated as individuals. This is because staff were not skilled in responding to people’s unique needs, and care plans did not give staff clear guidance.

Staff explained that some staff were less skilled than others. This impacted staff’s ability to understand people’s needs. One staff member said, “Some staff can be sharp. Like a person with dementia will go up and the staff will say 'you’re in my personal space' but the staff member doesn’t recognise that the person has dementia and doesn’t know what they are doing.”

People were not treated as individuals. One person was agitated and distressed for a few hours. Staff that walked past them, gave brief interactions. However, the person was not offered meaningful engagement to reduce their distress. The lack of engagement for this person meant people sat next to them were also listening to distress and shouting for a few hours. This was not a pleasant environment for these people to be in.

Staff had received training in ‘person centred care’ and ‘privacy and dignity’. However, this training had not resulted in people being treated as individuals. The routines of the care home and poor care planning did not support good practice.

People felt that they could engage in their own routines if they requested this. However, there was no evidence that people were proactively asked about their preferred routines.

A staff member explained that routines need to be requested by people. They said, “The routine is automatically set by the carer that they have. Like breakfast is at 9. If someone asked, then breakfast would be given at another time. But no one is proactively offered another time, they would have to ask for their own routine.”

We saw that routines of the care home were set by staff and not offered to people. For example, one person was asleep in the lounge. Staff woke the person up and told them they needed to move to a table for their lunch. The person was startled and distressed and did not want to move. The staff member continued suggesting that they moved position. After a few minutes of distress, another staff member kindly offered the person to have their lunch in their armchair.

Staff did not have clear guidance on what was important to people. Care plans did not include details on people’s routines, preferences and social needs. Staff explained that there was a poor-quality induction to also learn about people’s preferences.

People and relatives explained that staff were usually quick to respond to their requests for support. However, staff were not always skilled to know how best to support them, so would sometimes need to find a staff member who had the required skills.

Staff explained that the team was not always effective at responding to people’s needs. One staff member said, “The staff are lazy. They think that another staff will do something they don't want to be doing.”

We saw that staff responded to people’s distress. However, interactions were brief and then the staff member moved on and left the person alone. This brief interaction did not always provide sufficient assurances, so people sometimes became agitated again when the staff member left.

Staff explained that the staff team did not work effectively together. This impacted wellbeing of the staff team. One staff member said, “If I have made a mistake I was often told through gossip. Never did the management or senior to me come and inform me what I had done.”

Staff had received some supervision sessions and meetings with the management team. However, these processes had not improved workforce wellbeing. Three staff spoken to, explained that their wellbeing and mental health was low due to their work.