This inspection took place on 5 and 6 April 2017 and was announced. At the previous inspection in August 2014 the service was rated as ‘Good’.
Home Instead Senior care Huntingdon is a domiciliary care service that provides a personal care service to people living in their own home. At the time of our inspection 28 people were using the service. The service office is based on a business park near Huntingdon.
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.
Staff had been trained on how to keep people safe and they knew who they could report any incidents of harm to. However, we found that not all incidents of harm or potential harm had been reported by the registered manager or acted upon by them. This put people at risk of harm and meant that organisations responsible for investigating safeguarding were not able to respond in a timely manner to assure people’s safety.
Not all risk assessments were in place to support people with their safety. Where accidents and incidents had occurred action had not been taken to update people’s risk assessments to help prevent the potential for a reoccurrence. This increased the risk of people being exposed to a risk of harm.
Medicines were administered and managed safely by staff whose competency had been assessed. Accurate recording of medicines was in place as a result of the reminders to staff to ensure they recorded administered medicines accurately.
A sufficient number of staff with the necessary skills had been recruited to safely meet people’s needs.
Staff possessed the necessary care skills to meet people's nutritional needs. Staff enabled people to access health care support from external healthcare professionals when required.
People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible; the policies and systems in the service supported this practice. The registered manager was aware of what they were required to do should any person lack mental capacity. No one using the service needed to be lawfully deprived of their liberty.
People were looked after with kindness, compassion and with respect for their privacy and dignity.
People, their legal representative or relatives were enabled to be involved in identifying, determining and planning the review of their care.
People were supported to be as independent as they wanted to be where this was safe. People were supported in such a way that prevented any risk of social isolation. This included assistance with their hobbies, interests and pastimes.
An effective system was in place to gather and act upon people’s suggestions and concerns before they became a complaint.
The registered manager was supported by an operations’ and training manager, care schedulers, senior care staff and care staff. Staff had the support that they needed to fulfil their role effectively.
People, their relatives and staff were involved and enabled to make suggestions to improve how the service was run.
The registered manager and provider had not always notified the CQC about important events that that they were legally required to do. This prevented other statutory organisations responsible for investigating incidents to be alerted. Not all quality monitoring and assurance processes that were in place were effective. Trends in accidents and incidents were not always acted upon. This put people at risk of harm.
We found one breach of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 and one breach of the Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009.You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.