11 February 2022
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Sterling Care Liverpool is a domiciliary care agency that provides personal care to people in their own homes. At the time of the inspection 25 people were using the service.
Not everyone who used the service received personal care. 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.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
We received information raising concerns about staffing and how people using the service were being kept safe. We contacted the provider and asked for information around their systems and processes. This included policies staffing rota’s, assessment of needs, the preferred times of people's calls and their medication needs.
Based on the concerns we received we arranged this targeted inspection of the service to follow up on what the provider had told us they had put in place to mitigate these concerns.
We found people were supported by the correct number of staff, and received their medication and other associated care tasks on time. Staff told us they were happy with their rotas. Prior to our inspection we received concerns around staffing numbers. While we did not see any unsafe practice we did raise some concerns during our inspection due to some rotas being quite full with minimal travel space in-between calls. The registered manager was still in the process of making changes to ensure this was addressed.
The registered manager had completed audits of peoples needs, staffing numbers and recruitment and was open and transparent about remedial action they had needed to take to ensure the service was running safely.
Rating at last inspection
The last rating for this service was Good (published 11 July 2019).
Why we inspected
We undertook this targeted inspection to follow up on specific concerns which we had received about the service. The inspection was prompted in response to concerns received about staffing levels and rotas. A decision was made for us to inspect and examine those risks.
CQC have introduced targeted inspections to follow up on Warning Notices or to check specific concerns. They do not look at an entire key question, only the part of the key question we are specifically concerned about. Targeted inspections do not change the rating from the previous inspection. This is because they do not assess all areas of a key question.
We found no evidence during this inspection that people were at risk of harm from these concerns.
Please see the safe and well- led section of this full report.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Sterling Care Liverpool 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.