Brighton Oasis Project is a drug and alcohol charity. It became a registered provider for community-based drug and alcohol services in Brighton and Hove on 12 March 2014.

Brighton Oasis Project is one of a number of organisations that work together to provide drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services to people living in Brighton and Hove and East Sussex. Within the partnership, the role of Oasis Project is to coordinate the care and treatment of female only clients referred to the service, and to provide psychosocial interventions for clients with substance misuse issues. Other organisations within the partnership provide different roles such as the provision of medical assessments and community and inpatient detox services. Within this report these partnership organisations working with Brighton Oasis Project are referred to as ‘another provider’.

The service offers a range of harm minimisation services, such as needle exchange, overdose prevention, advice, and screening for blood borne viruses, and structured one-to-one and group work.

The service is registered for the following activities: Treatment of disease, disorder and injury. There was a registered manager in post at the time of the inspection.

We previously inspected this service in November 2016. Substance misuse services were not rated at that time.

Following the November 2016 inspection, we told the service it must take the following actions to make improvements:

• The provider must ensure appropriate pre-employment checks are undertaken and verified before staff are employed in the service to ensure care and treatment is provided by suitable staff.
• The provider must ensure that risks to staff of not using personal alarms is assessed and reviewed.
• The provider must ensure that the risks of cross-contamination and cross-infection in the use of the toilet area for drug test screening is assessed and reviewed.
• The provider must ensure that records of incidents and reportable events are maintained and monitored.
• We also told the provider that it should take the following actions to improve:
• The provider should ensure that staff have adequate guidance and are trained on the principles of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 so that they could adequately support a client who may lack capacity.
• The provider should ensure that arrangements are made on the ground floor to maintain client confidentiality.

We issued the provider with the following requirement notices under the Health and Social Care Act (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014: Regulation 17 Good governance Regulation 19 Fit and proper persons employed.

In July 2017 we completed a focussed inspection and determined that the provider had carried out sufficient improvements to meet the requirements of the regulations they had breached in November 2016.

During our inspection in June 2019 we determined that the provider had maintained the improvements made to the service and had also made a number of additional improvements.