The Old Post Office

The Old Post Office is a domiciliary care agency providing personal care to people in supported living accommodation. The service provides support to autistic people and people with a learning disability. At the time of our inspection there were 4 people using the service.

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 the inspection everyone using the service was receiving personal care.

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

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ is the guidance CQC follows to make assessments and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it.

Right Support:

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 did not support this practice. While staff supported people to make their own decisions and did not place unnecessary restrictions on people, this information had not been fully documented.

Systems to manage medicines did not always follow best practice and increased the risk of errors.

People were encouraged to take part in a wide range of activities and to maintain relationships with friends and family.

People’s health needs were supported, and staff worked with healthcare professionals to ensure people received the care they needed.

Right Care:

Risks to people were not fully assessed and care was not planned to keep people safe from harm.

Staff had not received all the training they needed to ensure they could provide safe care to people.

The service had enough staff to meet people’s needs. However, safe recruitment processes had not been followed to ensure staff were safe to work with people using the service. There was no training plan in place to ensure staff had the skills needed to provide safe care.

People received kind and compassionate care. Staff protected and respected people’s privacy and dignity. They understood and responded to their individual needs. Staff understood how to protect people from poor care and abuse.

People could communicate with staff and understand information given to them because staff supported them consistently and understood their individual communication needs.

Right Culture:

The provider had failed to monitor the quality of the service provided which led to shortfalls in the service. However, they were responsive to the concerns raised and wanted to improve. They took immediate action to rectify the issues we found. This included reviewing staff training, risk assessments and recruitment processes.

Staff turnover was very low, which supported people to receive consistent care from staff who knew them well. Staff placed people’s wishes, needs and rights at the heart of everything they did.

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

Rating at last inspection

This service was registered with us on 4 March 2021, and this is the first inspection.

Why we inspected

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

Enforcement

We have identified breaches in relation to managing risks, the safe management of medicines, lack of staff training and unsafe recruitment of staff and inadequate systems to monitor the quality of care provided at this inspection.

Please see the action we have told the provider to take at the end of this report.

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.