Archived: Housing & Care 21 - Milton Keynes

Updated 29 June 2016

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 is 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 undertook an announced focused inspection of Housing & Care 21 - Milton Keynes on 15 June 2016. This inspection was carried out to check that improvements to meet legal requirements planned by the provider after our 21 December 2015 comprehensive inspection had been made. We inspected the service against one of the five questions we ask about services; Is the service effective? This is because the service was not meeting some legal requirements.

The inspection team comprised of one inspector. We gave the provider 48 hours' notice prior to the inspection as we needed to make sure there would be staff available for us to speak with, and documentation available for us to review.

Before this inspection we reviewed all the information we held about the service, including data about safeguarding and statutory notifications. Statutory notifications are information about important events which the provider is required to send us by law. We spoke with the local authority to gain their feedback as to the care that people received. We also reviewed the report from our previous inspection.

During the inspection we spoke with the regional operations manager and the service manager about the changes they had introduced since our previous inspection. We also spoke with the learning development facilitator, a care coordinator and two members of care staff.

We reviewed information about the management of staff learning and development at the service, to corroborate what we were told.

Updated 29 June 2016

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection of this service on 21 December 2015, during which breaches of legal requirements were identified. We found that staff did not receive regular training to provide them with the skills and knowledge they needed to perform their roles.

We asked the provider to submit an action plan to tell us how they would meet these regulations in the future; they stated that they would have addressed the breaches of regulation by 29 April 2016. During this inspection we returned to see if the service had made the improvements they stated in their action plan. We found that the provider was now meeting these regulations.

We undertook this focused inspection on 15 June 2016, to check that they had followed their plan and to confirm that they now met legal requirements. This report only covers our findings in relation to those requirements. You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for Housing & Care 21 - Milton Keynes on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Housing & Care 21 is registered to provide personal care for adults in their own homes. They currently provide support for people with a range of needs, including people who may be living with dementia. On the day of our visit the service provided support for 65 people in their own homes.

The service did not have a registered manager; however there was a manager in post and their application to register was in progress with the Care Quality Commission (CQC). A registered manager is a person who has registered with the CQC to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are 'registered persons'. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Improvements had been made to staff training at the service. There was a clear induction process for new staff, which incorporated the Care Certificate and provided staff with training and support as they learned about their roles. There was also regular on-going training for staff to develop and maintain their skills. The service now had regular access to a regional training coordinator and systems were in place to manage staff training and support them to develop specialist skills required for their roles.