7 December 2022
During a routine inspection
About the service
Aspirations Birmingham is a ‘supported living’ service that provides personal care and support to people living in their own homes. The service supported people with mental health needs, people with a learning disability and/or autism.
At the time of the inspection the service supported 36 people. Not everyone who used the service received personal care. 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. The service supported 8 people who received personal care at the time of our inspection.
People were supported both in the community in their own houses and some people lived in a converted building that used to be a residential care home. For some people staff provided 24-hour care which included sleeping or waking night staff at the person’s home.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
Right Support:
People did not always receive the support they needed to keep them safe from risk of harm and which ensured all their needs were met. People were supported by the number of staff they needed but these staff did not always know people well which impacted on the support they received. Improvements were required to ensure people received the support they needed to manage and monitor their healthcare needs. The way people were supported with their medicines needed improving to ensure people only had medicines when they needed them and to ensure this was kept under regular review.
Not all people were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives. Not all staff supported people in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; Policies and systems in the service did not always support this practice.
Right Care:
People were not always supported in a way that promoted their dignity, privacy and human rights. Support provided to some people was not always person centred. However, this was not the experience for all people supported. People’s core staff were described as kind and caring, and they were passionate about improving people’s life experiences and support.
Right Culture:
The provider did not always promote a positive culture as staff did not always feel supported and communication was not always effective and inclusive. Systems in place did not always ensure complaints were managed and responded to effectively and in a timely way. Lessons learnt from these and other sources of feedback were not always embedded, to enable improvements to be made to improve outcomes for people.
The providers systems and processes were not effective in enabling the provider to identify where improvements were needed and to take action to address these in a timely manner.
The provider had an improvement plan in place which was updated to include the feedback we shared during and following our inspection.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection;
This service was registered with us on 23 August 2022 and this is the first inspection.
Why we inspected
The inspection was prompted in part due to concerns we had received about people’s care, such as medicines management, infection control issues, staffing and governance issues. A decision was made for us to inspect and examine those risks.
Enforcement
We have identified breaches in relation to management of risk and medicines, complaints and governance at this inspection.
Please see the action we have told the provider to take at the end of this report.
Follow up
We will request an action plan from the provider to understand what they will do to improve the standards of quality and safety. We will work alongside the provider and local authority to monitor progress. We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.