About the service My Life Choice is a domiciliary care service, providing personal care and support to people with learning disabilities and/or autism in their own homes, 24 hours a day. 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 the service was supporting a total of three people, all of whom received support with personal care.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
People were supported by staff who knew how to recognise abuse and raise concerns. Staff had been safely recruited. Staff had a good knowledge of risks associated with providing peoples care. Staff had received adequate training to meet peoples individual care needs.
Medicines were managed safely, and people received them as prescribed. Policies and procedures were in place for the safe administration of medicines and competency checks were completed for staff.
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 supported this practice. Peoples communication needs had been assessed and recorded in their care plans. These detailed the persons preferred method of communication and aids or equipment.
People and their relatives were involved in their care and support planning. This enabled staff to provide the care and support people had agreed was appropriate to them. Staff promoted people’s independence and spent time getting to know their specific needs and wishes. People’s privacy and dignity was respected.
The service worked with external health and social care professionals and specialist learning disability teams to provide effective joined up care. Quality assurance processes were robust and provided oversight of the service. The registered manager had ideas of how to continuously improve people's lives and valued working in partnership with others to achieve this.
Systems were in place to ensure lessons were learned and improvements made when things went wrong. Safeguarding incidents, and complaints were investigated, and outcomes had been provided. People and their relatives told us, “The registered manager will manage complaints and respond accordingly.”
We expect health and social care providers to guarantee autistic people and people with a learning disability the choices, dignity, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. Right Support, right care, right culture is the statutory guidance which supports CQC to make assessments and judgements about services providing support to people with a learning disability and/or autistic people.
The service was able to demonstrate how they were meeting the underpinning principles of Right support, right care, right culture. People were supported to reach their personal goals through person-centred approaches from leadership and staff with the right skills and attitudes to achieve this.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the Care Quality Commission (CQC) website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection
The last rating for this service was good (published 24 July 2019).
Why we inspected
This was a planned inspection based on the previous rating.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for My Life Choice on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service until we return to visit as per our re-inspection programme. If we receive any concerning information we may inspect sooner.