Updated 10 May 2019
The inspection:
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (the Act) 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 Act, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
Inspection team:
The inspection was completed by one adult social care inspector and one expert-by-experience. An expert-by-experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of service. The expert-by-experience had personal experience of older adults and adults with dementia, and people who used both residential and community services.
Service and service type:
Elite Home care is a small Domiciliary Care Agency which provides personal care to people in their own homes.
Not everyone using Elite Homecare receives regulated activity; CQC only inspects the service being received by people provided with ‘personal care’; help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided.
The provider of Elite Homecare is a registered individual and this person was part of the management team. 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. The service has a manager who was new to post. The provider intends that the new manager will register with the CQC as the registered manager. This process had not yet begun.
Notice of inspection:
We gave the service 48 hours’ notice of the inspection visit because it is small and the manager is often out of the office supporting staff or providing care. We needed to be sure that they would be available to answer any questions we might have during the inspection.
Inspection site visit activity started on 03 April 2019 and ended on 30 April 2019. We visited the office location on 3 April 2019 to see the registered provider and office staff; and to review care records and policies and procedures. Following this we made telephone calls to people and their relatives to speak with them about their experience of receiving support from Elite Homecare. We also spoke with staff about their experiences of working for the service.
What we did:
Prior to our inspection we requested a provider information return (PIR); this is a form that asks the provider to give us some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. This was not completed and returned to the CQC by the provider and meant that the well led domain could not be rated higher than ‘requires improvement’.
We reviewed the information we held about the service including notifications the provider had sent to us. We contacted the local authority safeguarding and local commissioning teams to obtain their views about the service. We contacted Healthwatch, which is an independent organisation which collects the views of people who use health and social care services, for any feedback they had received. This information was used to identify key lines of enquiry as part of the inspection.
During the inspection we spoke with seven people who were receiving support from the service, and two relatives on the telephone to gain an understanding of their views of the service and quality of support that people were receiving. We spoke with the registered provider, manager, care co-ordinator and three care staff.
We looked at four people's care records which included a wide range of support plans and risk assessments. We reviewed a range of documents relating to how the service was managed including; three staff personnel files, staff training records, policies, procedures and quality assurance audits.