Archived: Biggs Healthcare

Biggs Healthcare is a domiciliary care service registered to provide personal care to adults living 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, two people were using the service who had a range of care needs which included dementia and learning disabilities.

People’s experience of using this service and what we found

We (CQC) expect health and social care providers to guarantee autistic people and people with a learning disability the choices, dignity, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. Right support, right care, right culture is the statutory guidance which supports CQC to make assessments and judgements about services providing support to people with a learning disability and/or autistic people.

The service was able to demonstrate how they were meeting the underpinning principles of Right support, right care, right culture.

Right support: People’s rights were respected, and staff encouraged them to be as independent as possible. 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.

Right care: Staff provided kind, compassionate care and support which was person-centred; promoting people’s dignity, privacy and human rights. They had the right training and skills to carry out their roles and meet people’s needs. They made sure people had enough to eat and drink, and if anyone became unwell, staff knew how to access health care services to support people’s health and wellbeing. Staff also understood the importance of good hygiene and safe practices for the prevention and control of infection.

Right culture: The management team had created a positive culture which was person-centred, open and inclusive. We saw some good practice in terms of how the provider checked the quality of the service delivered, in order to drive improvement. However, we found improvements were needed with these checks; to ensure they covered all the areas that we (CQC) look at when we inspect registered services. This included taking action to ensure people always received their medicines as prescribed, reporting safeguarding concerns in a timely manner and completing all required recruitment checks for new staff before they begin working at the service.

The management team responded positively to our feedback. They confirmed they would be taking action to address all the areas we had identified for improvement.

Rating at last inspection

This service was registered with us on 10 July 2019, followed by a period of dormancy which ended in February 2021. This is the first inspection.

Why we inspected

This was a planned inspection, prompted by a review of the information we held about this service.

This was an ‘inspection using remote technology’. This means we did not visit the office location and instead used technology such as electronic file sharing to gather information, and video and phone calls to engage with people using the service as part of this performance review and assessment.

We have found evidence that the provider needs to make some improvements. Please see the safe and well-led sections of this full report.

You can see what action we have asked the provider to take at the end of this full report.

For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk

Follow up

We will request an action plan from the provider to understand what they will do to improve the standards of quality and safety. We will work alongside the provider and local authority to monitor progress. We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.