Background to this inspection
Updated
26 February 2021
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. We checked whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Act. We looked at the overall quality of the service and provided a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
Inspection team
The inspection was carried out by one inspector and an 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 care service.
Service and service type
This service is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to people living in their own homes.
The service had a registered manager. This means that they are legally responsible for how the service is run and for the quality and safety of the care provided. The registered manager was not available at the time of the inspection. We were supported by the care coordinator and an external consultant.
Notice of inspection
Our inspection was announced. We gave the service notice of the inspection. This was because it is a domiciliary care service and we needed to be sure that a staff member would be in the office to support us with the inspection.
What we did before the inspection
The provider was not asked to complete a provider information return prior to this inspection. This is information we require providers to send us to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make.
We reviewed the information we already held about this service. This included details of its registration, previous inspection reports and any notifications of significant incidents the provider had sent us. We used all of this information to plan our inspection.
During the inspection
We spoke with the care coordinator, external consultant, two people and seven relatives. We reviewed documents and records that related to people’s care and the management of the service. We reviewed five care plans, which included risk assessments and five staff files, which included pre-employment checks.
After the inspection
We continued to seek clarification from the provider to validate evidence we found such as staff call logs and quality assurance records. We also spoke to five care staff.
Updated
26 February 2021
About the service
This service is a domiciliary care agency and is based in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham. The service provides personal care to adults in their own homes. 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.
At the time of our inspection, the service provided personal care to 22 people.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
At our last comprehensive inspection on 22 January 2019, we found shortfalls that may place people at risk of harm. We found that risk assessments had not been completed for people to minimise the risks of avoidable harm and robust pre-employment checks had not been carried out to ensure staff can safely work with vulnerable people. During this inspection, we found improvements had been made.
Risk assessments had been carried out to ensure people received safe care. Pre-employment checks such as references had been sought to ensure staff were suitable to support people. Systems were in place to monitor staff time-keeping and rotas were sent in advance to staff to minimise missed calls and late calls.
Quality assurance systems were in place to identify shortfalls and take prompt action to ensure people always received safe care. However, improvements were required with record keeping as we found some gaps in people’s medicines records and staff files. We have made a recommendation about this.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection and update
The previous rating for this service was requires improvement (published 9 March 2019) and there were breaches of regulation. CQC had issued requirement notices for Regulation 19 (Fit and Proper Persons) and Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014.
Why we inspected
We undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led to check if the service was compliant with the requirement notices issued at the last comprehensive inspection and to see if improvements had been made.
No areas of concern were identified in the other key questions. We therefore did not inspect them. Ratings from previous inspections for those key questions were used in calculating the overall rating at this inspection.
The overall rating for the service has changed from requires improvement to good. This is based on the findings at this inspection.
You can read the report from our last inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Unique Care UK on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service until we return to visit as per our re-inspection programme. If we receive any concerning information we may inspect sooner.