Updated 8 June 2017
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 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 Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
We carried out an unannounced comprehensive inspection of this service on 17, 18, 19 January 2017. Four breaches of legal requirements were found. After the comprehensive inspection, the provider wrote to us to say what they would do to meet legal requirements. They stated they would meet legal requirements in relation to the safe management of medicines by 18 April 2017. Following that inspection, concerns were raised with us about the way the service ordered and looked after people’s medicines and the use of thickening agents in people’s drinks.
We undertook this unannounced focused inspection on 9 May 2017 to check that the service had followed their plan to address the medicines shortfalls from the comprehensive inspection and also to review the medicines in light of the concerns that had been raised since that inspection. This report only covers our findings in relation to this topic.
The inspection was undertaken by one medicines inspector.
Before our inspection we reviewed all the information about concerns relating to medicines that had been received by the Care Quality Commission since the last inspection.
At the inspection on 9 May 2017, we spoke to the support manager, five nurses and one member of the care staff. We looked at the arrangements for ordering, storing, and administering medicines. We looked at 26 medicines administration records started on 8 May 2017 and 16 from the previous month. We also saw the application records for three people’s creams and ointments and four people’s care records relating to their medicines. We saw five recent medicines audits carried out by staff and three medicines error reports.