Style Acre

Updated 18 February 2025

Style Acre is registered to provide personal care in dedicated supported living services for people with a learning disability and/or autistic people. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. At the time of the assessment site visit, there were 95 people receiving a regulated activity across supported living services in Oxfordshire.

We carried out this assessment because we received concerns about people’s safety and the management of the service. At our last inspection, we rated this service outstanding overall (report published 27 December 2017). Following this assessment, the overall rating has changed to good. We identified concerns about the governance and leadership and have reported these under the well-led key question.

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ (RSRCRC) is the guidance CQC follows to make assessments and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it. During this latest assessment, we found the service was able to demonstrate how they were meeting the underpinning principles of RSRCRC.

We started our site visits by visiting the provider’s office on 28 February 2025. The site visits were undertaken by 3 inspectors, a medicines inspector and an operations manager, with the support of a senior specialist for people with a learning disability and autistic people. The site visits were undertaken between 28 February 2025 and 14 March 2025. 3 experts by experience spoke with people who used the service and their relatives to hear about their experience of the care provided. An expert by experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.
 

As part of this assessment, we spoke with 12 people who used the service and 22 relatives. We spoke with 27 members of staff and reviewed documentation including policies, care records, training records, recruitment files, governance records and procedures. We visited 9 supported living services operated by the provider.

Updated 18 February 2025

People told us they felt safe living at the service, and we found they generally received personalised care that was tailored to their needs. People told us they were supported to monitor their health, and they felt staff were kind and caring. Staff sought people’s consent prior to commencing a task and where people lacked capacity to make decisions, there were systems in place to ensure decisions were made with people’s representatives and in their best interests. People were empowered to make decisions, and their independence was championed by staff. People received information in a format that worked for them which meant that they could be as involved in their care as possible. People’s differences were respected by staff, and they listened to them. The provider had made recent changes to the governance structure of the service, and we found this had a positive impact on people. People told us they had opportunities to participate in meaningful activities and to be part of the local community. People told us they felt leaders were approachable and they could confide in them. Where we identified areas of improvement in relation to reporting concerns appropriately, consistent oversight of the service and ensuring people’s care plans were always followed, the provider took action to address these.