Updated 28 June 2019
The inspection:
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (the Act) as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Act, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
Inspection team: This inspection was carried out by one inspector.
Service and service type: West Berkshire Adult Placement Scheme is a shared lives service which supports shared lives carers to provide a home for people who are unable to or choose not to live on their own. A shared lives carer is a person who, under the terms of a shared lives carer agreement, provides personal care together with, where necessary, accommodation in their own home. They work with the scheme to meet the identified needs of people they are providing care for. They are recruited, trained, approved and monitored by shared lives schemes but are self-employed. However, for the purpose of care regulation they are considered to be employees under the definition of employment. We will refer to them in this report as shared lives carers.
The service also employed shared lives officers. Their role included elements of recruitment, approval and training of carers, matching and arranging, supporting, monitoring and reviewing placements. We will refer to them in this report as shared lives officers.
At the time of our inspection the service did not have a registered manager. An application by the current scheme manager had been submitted to the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
A registered manager is a person who has registered with the (CQC) 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 2008 and associated regulations about how the service is run.
Notice of inspection:
We gave the service 48 hours’ notice of the inspection visit because needed to make sure the relevant staff and information would be available in the office.
The inspection site visit took place on 20 May 2019. We visited the office to meet with shared lives officers, review care records, as well as relevant policies and procedures. The previous manager and the new manager were who has applied for registered manager through the CQC, were available and assisted us during the inspection.
What we did:
Before the inspection the registered manager completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. This information helps support our inspection. We looked at the PIR and at all the information we had collected about the service. We looked at the notifications we had received for this service. Notifications are information about important events the service is required to send us by law.
During the inspection:
We spoke with the current and previous manager, two shared lives officers and administrator.
We looked at four people’s care records and associated documents such as medicine records. We looked at records of accidents, incidents, compliments and complaints received by the service.
We looked at audits and quality assurance reports completed by the management team. We looked at recruitment records for shared lives carers, shared lives carers meeting minutes, staff supervision and appraisal records.
After the inspection we spoke with four shared lives carers and one person who uses the shared lives service and four relatives of people who use the shared lives service.
We attempted to speak to more people that used the shared lives service, but we were informed by relatives that they could not verbally communicate on the telephone.
Additional information was gathered which included, feedback surveys fro