Merle Boddy House

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

Caring – this means we looked for evidence that the service involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect. At our last assessment we rated this key question requires improvement. At this assessment the rating has changed to inadequate. This meant people were not treated with compassion impacting on their dignity; staff caring attitudes had significant shortfalls. The service was previously in breach of the legal regulation in relation to person-centred care. Improvements were not found at this assessment, and the service remained in breach of this regulation.

This service scored 25 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The service did not treat people with kindness, empathy and compassion, or respect their privacy and dignity. We identified restrictive practices within the service, which were in place for certain individuals impacting on the standards of personalised care everyone received. We identified examples of incidents where people’s dignity had not been upheld, with a lack of onward reporting in place to ensure action was taken when required.

The service did not treat people as individuals or make sure people’s care, support and treatment met people’s needs and preferences. The service did not take account of people’s strengths, abilities, aspirations, culture and unique backgrounds and protected characteristics. People’s individuality and protected characteristics were not consistently recognised and upheld. Improvements to people’s level of involvement and contribution to the development of their own care and support plans, as well as the day to day running of the service was required to ensure individual strengths and aspirations were fully recognised.

The service did not promote people’s independence, so people did not know their rights and have choice and control over their own care, treatment and wellbeing. Limitations within the care environment impacted on accessibility, particularly to the enclosed garden area which we observed to have variations in surface heights. Blanket restrictive practices found within the service impacted on people’s levels of choice and control over their daily routines. The restrictive practices in place dictated times of day when people showered, access to personal snacks and items from the kitchen, and people’s abilities to see out of the ground floor windows of the service.

The service did not listen to or understand people’s needs, views and wishes. Staff did not respond to people’s needs in the moment or act to minimise any discomfort, concern or distress. We identified a lack of tools in place to ensure people were supported to be able to inform staff when experiencing pain, this was particularly important for those people with limited verbal communication. We identified care records often documented people as being ‘happy’ even when they had experienced a negative care outcome. We observed some staff to lack understanding of people’s needs and changes in abilities, for example linked to the progression of their dementia, and the impact this had on their abilities to interpret and communicate their immediate needs and wishes to staff.

The service did not care about or promote the wellbeing of their staff. They did not support or enable staff to deliver person-centred care. People were not consistently receiving personalised care from staff who themselves were well supported. We identified gaps in staff supervision and oversight of their individual wellbeing and performance. This impacted on the standards of care and support people received. We identified concerns in relation to the individual performance of certain staff and leaders as an outcome of this assessment, and liaised with the provider following our site visits.