- Care home
Pathfinders Specialist and Complex Care
Assessment report published 21 May 2026
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment: 29 April 2026. Pathfinders Neurological Care Centre is a care home providing support including nursing care to people over the age of 18 including those living with sensory impairments and physical disabilities. At the time of the assessment, the service was supporting 56 people with their personal care needs.
Pathfinders Neurological Care Centre was last rated requires improvement (published 9 September 2025). The assessment was carried out due to follow up on enforcement action and improvement we ask the provider to take to address these concerns. This responsive assessment focused on quality statements within all 5 key questions of safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. In total 20 quality statements were assessed. The scores for these quality statements reviewed have been combined with scores based on the key question ratings from previous assessments. The assessment found the provider was no longer in breach of regulation relating to safe care and treatment and governance.
We assessed the service against ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgements about whether the provider guaranteed people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. At the time of the assessment, the service was not supporting any autistic people or people with a learning disability.
The home environment was now cleaned and maintained to high standard and risks associated with infection prevention control had been mitigated because of these improvements. Pathfinders Neurological Care Centre had implemented more structured and consistent staffing deployment methods which staff and people told us were beneficial and supported their overall experience and outcomes which included access to the community and positive risk taking. People now received their medicine safely and medicine management was effective at monitoring stock levels and identifying risks and errors quickly. The provider had implemented a range of governance and quality monitoring processes which were effective in monitoring the performance of the home and people’s experience, for example, audits of response times to call bells and management daily walk round audits. Lesson learned where now freely discussed with staff and a culture of openness and learning was fostered to ensure risks were mitigated and staff could develop their skills safely and effectively.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with people and their relatives about the changes the provider had implemented and their experience of this since our last assessment. People and or their relatives told us there had been positive improvement around staffing levels and their availability, one person said, “It’s so much better than it was,” and another person commented, “There is always someone about to help regardless of time, day or night.”Relatives described more consistent access was now available for people to go out trips and out into the community. Everyone told us staff were kind and caring and they felt safe living at the home.