- Community substance misuse service
Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Wellbeing Service - City of Westminster and RBKC
Assessment report published 28 July 2025
Contents
Ratings - Community-based substance misuse services
Our view of the service
Date of inspection: 6-8 May 2025.
Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Wellbeing Service - City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) is a community-based substance misuse service in London. It provides support to adult residents of the 2 boroughs, including those of no fixed abode, who are impacted by drugs and alcohol. It is an independent service jointly commissioned by the 2 local authorities and is run by Turning Point, a national not-for-profit provider.
The service operates from 3 hubs, with 2 located in Westminster (Wardour Street and Harrow Road) and 1 in Kensington and Chelsea (Acorn Hall). The core service is open 5 days a week, with activities available in the evenings and at weekends. All care and treatment is free of charge to access.
The service supports clients engaging in Tier 2 (assessment, psychosocial support, harm reduction and aftercare) and Tier 3 (structured treatment) interventions. At the time of our inspection, just over 860 clients accessed the Tier 3 pathway.
The service registered with the Care Quality Commission on 24 June 2021 to provide treatment of disease, disorder or injury. At the time of our inspection, the service had a registered manager in post. This was our initial comprehensive inspection of the service, across all key questions and quality statements. We have combined the scores for these to achieve the overall rating. We rated the service as good overall.
We found several areas of good and outstanding practice:
- The service had a well-established, highly skilled and experienced staff team who received effective training and support. Staff worked effectively with other teams and organisations to improve the outcomes for people. There were robust systems for safe recruitment of staff working with vulnerable people.
- The service had fostered a culture where lived experience of staff and volunteers was recognised, valued and utilised in meaningful ways. The service had developed an innovative workshop to support staff with lived experience. Clients had access to training, volunteering and employment. Service user representatives actively participated in decision-making at provider level.
- Staff were acutely aware of the risks of continued substance misuse and ensured people could access support without delay. The service was an early adopter of ‘Click and Deliver', an innovative scheme to widen access to Naloxone, a life-saving medication that can reverse an opioid overdose.
- Staff worked with others effectively to safeguard people from harm, including groups with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 and those facing multiple challenges. The team's work was recognised by a London Homelessness Award in 2024.
- Staff were creative in supporting people to lead healthier lives. The service had developed an award-winning outdoor fitness programme that was available 7 days a week.
- Clients, carers and partner agency stakeholders praised the staff as exceptionally kind, caring and compassionate.
- Staff delivered person-centred care and developed services in partnership with people. The service offered tailored provision for women, LGBTQ+ communities, people experiencing homelessness, carers and EU nationals.
- The team demonstrated excellent partnership working. Staff shared learning and worked across organisational boundaries creatively to improve people's lives. Staff played key roles in joint projects and delivered training to local professionals and students.
- Staff reported a positive, open and inclusive culture and leaders actively supported staff wellbeing.
We found some areas for improvement. We identified some gaps in safety checks at the Harrow Road hub, including the weekly fire alarm tests not being carried out in line with the procedure. There was no feedback or complaint procedure on display at Harrow Road at the time of our inspection and some clients we spoke with felt the feedback process could be improved. Harrow Road and Wardour Street hubs did not have step-free access and information about accessibility was not widely available. We raised these concerns with the leaders, who provided prompt assurance that these would be rectified, or mitigated, with immediate effect.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 9 clients of the service and 6 relatives/carers. We observed a Family and Friends group and a client consultation.
Client and carer feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Several people told us they “did not know where they would be without the service”. One client said: “It changed my life”. Clients and carers said the staff listened to them and described them as “fantastic”, “tremendous”, kind, non-judgmental, responsive and very supportive.
Clients felt involved in their care, supported to access a range of other services and said their treatment met their needs effectively. Carers said that staff explained treatment information clearly and that support available was excellent. Carers could give feedback on their experience via a survey or directly to staff. However, some clients we spoke with reported more limited opportunities to provide feedback.
The service carried out an annual client survey about their experience which also invited their suggestions. The results of the most recent survey showed that the majority of respondents were very positive about their care. The leaders had planned several actions in response to the survey feedback, for example developing new activities and additional support for some clients around completing paperwork.