The last inspection of Comfort Call Tameside was carried out on 27 February 2014. The service met the regulations we inspected against at that time.
This inspection took place on 13, 14 and 19 August 2015. The inspection was announced to ensure that the registered manager or other responsible person would be available to assist with the inspection visit.
Comfort Call Tameside provides care and support to people who require the services of a domiciliary care agency. The offices of the agency are situated in the Tameside area of Manchester.
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.
We found the provider had breached Regulation 12 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. We found improvements were required to the way in which management of medicines was carried out. Medicine records were not always completed. You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.
Although a system was in place to audit how the service was operating, the audit to review the way in which medicines were managed within the service was not as effective as it should have been, and improvements were needed.
People we spoke with told us they felt safe with the staff that visited and supported them. Staff completed training in safeguarding adults as part of their induction training which was then refreshed on an annual basis.
Both people using the service and relatives we spoke with said that staff had the knowledge and skills to do a good job.
People were very positive about the caring and compassionate nature of the staff that supported them. They told us that their privacy and dignity was maintained when being supported with personal care tasks. People who we spoke with also told us that they were always asked for their consent before care staff carried out any particular care or support tasks.
Staff were provided with and had access to, information to help them deliver care and support to meet the identified and assessed needs of the people using the service.
There was a recruitment and selection process in place that helped the employer to make safe recruitment decisions when employing new staff. The staff we spoke with confirmed they had received an induction and relevant training when they started their employment with the agency. Records indicated that training was then regularly updated for each member of the staff team.
We looked at the complaints records kept by the agency. Each complaint that had been made had been logged individually and we saw that a total of 13 complaints had been recorded since the fifth of January 2015. A complaint investigation report had been completed which detailed the summary of the complaint, investigation methodology, findings and corrective and preventative actions.
The provider had used annual survey questionnaires to gain people’s views about the quality of service being provided.
We saw there were policies and procedures available to support, inform and guide staff and people using the service.