Archived: Barnardo's Viking House

We found that before people received care and treatment appropriate consent was sought from the person and/or their parents or guardians. We spoke with two nurses and one care worker, who told us how they involved people in providing consent to treatment. One said 'you can ask her if she would like pain relief. She can communicate what's hurting. She'll voice her opinion on whether she would like medication'. We saw signed consent forms relating to care and treatment within the care plans we looked at.

We found the care plans [profiles] to be comprehensive documents providing information to care workers on how to provide specialised care, to meet the complex needs of the people using the service. A nurse described the care plan as 'almost like a bible for us. We definitely carry it around and consult it'. We saw that nurses and care workers had received specialist training to enable them to provide care and operate equipment to meet individual needs. A guardian we spoke with told us that the service had been 'so flexible all the way through with the changing needs' and that they had 'gone over and above board' and 'provided so much more that the minimum'.

People were safe. Care workers and nurses we spoke with had received regular training and understood how to identify the possibility of abuse and knew how to report concerns.

There were effective recruitment and selection procedures in place to ensure that applicants had the right skills and qualifications to undertake their roles.

The provider had effective quality assurance and risk management systems in place.

Because of the nature of the service we were unable to see the people who used the service in their home environments. However, we were able to speak to two their parents by 'phone. On the day of our visit the staff were attending one of their monthly training days. Therefore we were able to speak to staff members who might otherwise have been out on visits.

Although there were some constraint on the input that both the provider and parents could have into the overall care package, parents were able to exercise a degree of choice regarding the day to day care for the young people who used the service and worked closely the domiciliary care staff who went into their homes.

Each young person had a comprehensive care profile which was reviewed on a regular basis, and covered their physical, psychological and spiritual needs as well as giving details of the kinds of activities they liked to be involved in. The provider took the safeguarding of children very seriously, and all staff were properly qualified and trained to do their jobs effectively. There were a range of processes for monitoring and managing the quality of the service.