Elmcroft Care Home

Updated 5 November 2024

Date of Assessment: 26 November to 18 December 2024. Elmcroft Care Home is a residential care home with nursing provision, set over 2 units. The service is registered to provide care for younger and older people, those living with dementia, and people with a physical disability. The service can support up to 54 people. At the time we started our assessment, there were 25 people living at the service. We completed this assessment in response to concerns about the service identified at our last assessment, and to check for improvement. We looked at quality statements in the key questions of safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. We found 3 continued breaches of the legal regulations in relation to person-centred care, safeguarding, and governance. The provider had made improvements in the areas of staffing and safe care and treatment and was no longer in breach of these regulations. Since the last assessment, there was a new management team in post, including a new home manager and a new Nominated Individual. The Nominated Individual is responsible for supervising the management of the service on behalf of the provider. Improvements had been made to support safe care and treatment for people, including infection prevention and control, staff recruitment and medicines management. However, we found there was a continued lack of personalised care for people living at the service. In instances where CQC have decided to take civil or criminal enforcement action against a provider, we will publish this information on our website after any representations and/ or appeals have been concluded. This service remains in special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we user our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a timeframe within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide.

Updated 5 November 2024

Whilst some people we spoke with expressed they were happy with their care, our assessment found elements of the care did not meet the expected standards. We also carried out observations where people could not tell us about their experience. We received mixed feedback from people using the service, with both positive and negative comments. This reflected our continued concerns relating to a lack of personalised care, which could place people at the risk of social isolation or low mood. Although staff were kind and compassionate, support was still task-led and did not reflect measures to proactively enhance people’s quality of life, independence or wellbeing in a meaningful way. One person told us, “Yes and no if I like it here, staff are very kind, but there’s no one really to talk to.” Another person said, “Staff are kind and very caring, and will always make me a cup of tea if I ask them.” However, another person said, “I hate it here, no one comes in to talk to me much.” Despite this, we received consistently positive feedback about the new management team in place, and all the relatives we spoke with confirmed there had been improvements made following their appointment. A relative told us, “We are very happy with [our person’s] care, and it shows there has been a vast improvement with everything. The cleanliness of the place is greatly improved, and decorating going on. The staff have improved so much, and [we] feel this is down to the new management.”