14 December 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Swan House is a care home providing nursing and personal care for up to 45 people. The service provides support to people who are both residential and nursing care. Some of the people in the home were live with dementia. People have access to their own bedroom along with communal spaces including lounges. The home is split between 2 floors, the lower provides residential care and the upper floor provides nursing care. At the time of our inspection 28 people were living in the home.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
This was a targeted inspection that considered the assessment, monitoring and management of risk and the clinical leadership and oversight of the service. Our inspection focused only on people who were receiving nursing care at the service. Based on our inspection of these areas we found:
People remained at risk of preventable harm from falling and choking. Safe systems were not in place to enable staff to effectively identify when peoples’ health was deteriorating, which meant people were at risk of not receiving timely medical support to keep them well.
Effective systems were not in place to consistently identify safety and quality concerns. This meant prompt and effective action was not taken to improve safety and quality.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection and update
The last rating for the service was inadequate and there were breaches of regulation (published 19 January 2024). The service was placed into special measures and we followed our agreed regulatory response.
At this inspection we found the provider remained in breach of regulations.
Why we inspected
We undertook this targeted inspection to check on ongoing concerns from people who visited the service relating to the safety and quality of the care provided. We had also received concerns about the management of peoples’ health when their health deteriorated. A decision was made for us to inspect and examine those risks.
The overall rating for the service has not changed following this targeted inspection and remains inadequate.
We use targeted inspections to follow up on Warning Notices or to check 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.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Swan House on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Enforcement and Recommendations
We have identified breaches in relation to safe care and treatment and the clinical oversight at the service at this inspection.
You can see what action we have asked the provider to take at the end of this full report.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.
The overall rating for this service is ‘Inadequate’ and the service therefore remains in ‘special measures’. This means we will keep the service under review and, if we do not propose to cancel the provider’s registration, we will re-inspect within 6 months to check for significant improvements.
If the provider has not made enough improvement within this timeframe and there is still a rating of inadequate for any key question or overall rating, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures. This will mean we will begin the process of preventing the provider from operating this service. This will usually lead to cancellation of their registration or to varying the conditions the registration.
For adult social care services, the maximum time for being in special measures will usually be no more than 12 months. If the service has demonstrated improvements when we inspect it and it is no longer rated as inadequate for any of the five key questions it will no longer be in special measures.