Archived: Housing & Care 21 - Alexandra Place

Care workers asked people's permission before they commenced support tasks. However, the provider did not have suitable arrangements in place for obtaining and acting in accordance with people's consent. In addition, where people could not give consent themselves the provider had not gained other people's consent in line with the legal requirements.

People's care was delivered to them in accordance with their documented support plans. We found people's care packages were adjusted when their needs changed and were responsive to changes in health and domestic requirements.

People were protected again the risk of abuse because the provider had appropriate arrangements in place to identify and prevent abuse from occurring. People we spoke with told us they felt safe and would not hesitate to report poor care.

Care workers had suitable arrangements for supervision and performance appraisal. However, there were not suitable arrangements in place to ensure care workers received appropriate training to enable them to deliver care to service users safely and to an appropriate standard.

People we spoke with did not have complaints about the personal care they received. People told us they would feel comfortable to make a complaint if they needed to, and there was a suitable complaints management process in place the provider could use to deal with them.

We found the provider had taken action following our last inspection. The provider had made sure that required information and recruitment checks were available for staff providing personal care to people using the service.

Staff we spoke with told us the new recruitment procedures were easy to follow. They felt the new system helped them, as far as possible, to make sure that new staff were suitable and safe to work with the people using their service.

In this report the name of a registered manager appears who was not in post and not managing the regulated activity at this location at the time of the inspection. Their name appears because they were still the registered manager on our register at the time. They have filed an application to cancel their registration which is being processed.

In the absence of the registered manager, the service was being managed by the area locality manager. No managers were available on the first day of our inspection and we returned to look at additional evidence. On the second day the organisation's nominated individual and head of recruitment were at the service and able to provide additional information on the action the organisation was taking to reach compliance with staff recruitment.

We found the provider had taken action to ensure that only staff with the required Schedule 3 information available were allowed to work unsupervised when providing personal care to people using the service.

We found the provider had begun action to completely review and revise the organisation's national recruitment and selection processes and practices. As that work is not exclusive to Alexandra Place and involves improvements at provider level, the ongoing involvement has been passed to our corporate provider compliance team who will maintain an overview of the level of compliance of corporate providers.

We found the provider had failed to make the necessary changes and improvements to meet the standards required relating to staff recruitment.

The manager was registered with CQC in August of this year. During our inspection the manager told us he had resigned his position and would not be the registered manager at Alexandra Place after 02 November 2012. The registered manager was not aware of the arrangements for the management of the location after 02 November 2012.