8 March 2022
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Bridgewater House is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to mostly older people living in their own homes mainly in the London Borough of Hillingdon. It also supports some adults who are living with dementia and adults who have physical or learning disabilities. At the time of our inspection the service was providing care to 13 people.
Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do we also consider any wider social care provided.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
People told us they felt safe. Where there were risks to people’s safety and wellbeing, these had been assessed and the provider had done all that was reasonably practicable to lessen those risks.
People who required support with their medicines received these safely and as prescribed. Staff received training in the administration of medicines and had their competencies assessed.
People's care and risk management plans set out the care tasks they required help with and these contained personalised information about people and their preferences for how they liked to be supported.
There were robust systems in place to monitor the quality of the service and recognise when improvements were required. The provider was transparent and there was clear communication within the team, so they learnt from mistakes and made improvements when things went wrong.
We received positive feedback from people about using the service. People said staff were caring and treated them with dignity and respect.
There were enough staff to support people and staff usually arrived on time at people’s homes. The provider’s monitoring system helped ensure people received all their visits as planned. Staff received induction, training and supervision and felt supported in their roles.
The provider sought feedback from people, relatives and staff and used this to develop the service. People and staff were confident they could raise any concerns they had with the registered manager and felt they would be listened to.
The registered manager, manager and senior staff were responsive to and worked in partnership with other agencies to meet people’s needs.
People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; the policies and systems in the service supported this practice.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection
The last rating for this service was good (published January 2020).
Why we inspected
We received whistleblowing concerns in relation to the provider. As a result, we undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe, responsive and well-led only.
For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating.
The overall rating for the service has not changed based on the findings of this inspection.
We found no evidence during this inspection that people were at risk of harm from this concern. Please see the safe, responsive and well-led sections of this full report.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Bridgewater House on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.