Archived: Mears Care - Ealing

Updated 19 December 2015

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection checked 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.

This inspection took place on 17 November 2015 and was announced. The provider was given 48 hours’ notice because the location provides a domiciliary care service and we wanted to make sure someone was available.

The inspection visit was conducted by one inspector. A second inspector and an expert-by-experience supported the inspection by making telephone calls to people who used the service to find out about their experiences. An expert-by-experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service. The expert-by-experience on this inspection had personal and professional experience of using care services.

Before the inspection visit we spoke with 42 people who used the service and/or their relatives. We also spoke with the senior contracts manager at the London Borough of Ealing who monitored the care they had purchased from the agency.

During the inspection we met with the manager and regional manager. We looked at the provider’s records for monitoring the service. We also looked at the provider’s records of complaints, missed visits and safeguarding alerts. We looked at three care records for people who used the service and the staff training and support records for two staff. We looked at records of the provider’s contact with people using the service and staff.

Updated 19 December 2015

The inspection took place on 17 November 2015 and was announced. We gave the provider 48 hours’ notice because the location provides a domiciliary care and we wanted to make sure someone was available.

The last inspection was on the 17 March 2015 when we found breaches of four Regulations relating to safe care and treatment, good governance, the support of staff and the identifying, receiving and handling of complaints.

We undertook this inspection so we could look at whether the provider had made progressing in meeting these breaches. The inspection also took place because the Home Office Immigration Enforcement Department had found that some of the staff employed at the location were working illegally in the UK. This had resulted in a number of staff leaving the employment of the agency without any notice impacting on the service being provided. We wanted to make sure people’s needs were being met and the agency had plans in place to recover from this.

Mears Care-Ealing is an agency providing personal care and support to people who live in the own homes in the London Borough of Ealing. This location is a branch of a national organisation, Mears Care Limited. The Ealing branch provided a service to 127 people at the time of the inspection. The majority of people were older adults, some had dementia. There were also a small number of younger adults with a physical disability, acquired brain injury, learning disability or mental health needs.

There was a manager in post. He had started work at the location four weeks before our inspection. He was in the process of applying to be registered with the Care Quality Commission. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission 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 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

The care people received had been affected by the sudden loss of staff in September. The manager and other senior staff also left around this time and this affected how the service was coordinated and managed. However, the new manager had been in post for four weeks at the time of our inspection and we could see that improvements had started. The impact of the loss of staff had been reduced as new staff had been employed.

Most people felt safe, although some people raised concerns about unfamiliar care workers, or care workers arriving late or not at all. The provider had introduced systems to reduce the risk of missed visits and to monitor visits. However, some people reported that visits were not always on time, and some people did not receive care as planned. This meant people were still at risk.

The staff had not received the supervision and support they needed since the incident in September 2015. The provider was starting to offer more support and supervision to all staff and there were plans for them to have regular supervision from senior staff.

People told us the care workers were kind, polite and caring.

People felt their complaints were responded to and investigated by the provider.

The provider had an action plan to address some of the areas of improvement.

You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.