Archived: Prestbury Care Providers

Updated 15 October 2025

Date of assessment: 21 October to 25 November 2025. A comprehensive inspection was commenced due to stakeholders sharing concerns of a safeguarding nature. Prestbury Care Providers is a care at home service providing support to older people, younger adults, people living with dementia, a mental health need, a sensory impairment, a physical disability and/or people with a learning disability or an autistic person. There were 14 people receiving the regulated activity of personal care at the start of the inspection. Due to the service supporting people with a learning disability and/or autistic person, the CQC’s guidance ‘Right Care, Right Culture, Right Support’ was considered as part of this inspection.

The service had taken on complex care packages and had failed to meet the needs of the people at the centre of these, often people living with a learning disability and/or autistic people. Staff did not demonstrate they had the skills to meet people’s often profound needs, and this had been compounded by the poor-quality training they received. Despite people and staff raising concerns, these had not been acted upon. We found that people’s dignity had not always been upheld due to receiving care from multiple staff, and in the language staff used to describe the care they delivered. People had not been protected from abuse. The provider had some governance systems in place, but these had failed to appropriately monitor and improve the service. The significant shortfalls found at this inspection demonstrated the culture of the service was closed and did not nurture personalised, dignified, and compassionate care that met people’s needs and kept them in control.

This inspection found the provider to be in breach of 7 legal regulations. These related to safe care and treatment, person-centred care, dignity and respect, safeguarding, staffing, managing complaints and governance. This service is being placed in special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we use our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a timeframe within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide.

Updated 15 October 2025

For those people who did not have needs associated with a learning disability or autistic people, they told us the service generally met their needs. However, where care was being delivered to people with a learning disability or autistic people, they had been consistently and negatively impacted by the service they received; their relatives told us this. For example, for autistic people, routine and consistency is often important and this had not been achieved by the service meaning people had become regularly distressed. Relatives told us how this had impacted on their family members and the distress it had caused them as loved ones. One relative summed their experience up by saying, “The care given (by Prestbury Care Providers) has put a wedge in our family as others have to take a back seat. We have let [person who uses the service] down and not met their needs. They have started to display different behaviours and have stopped sleeping.” Relatives spoke of a service that failed to consider their family member’s dignity by sending different staff, often at short notice, or not at all meaning they as family members had to step in to cover the needs of their loved ones. They told us staff did not have the skills to meet the often profound needs of their family members and that their concerns around this, when raised with the provider, felt like they were unheard as they were not acted upon. This had left relatives distressed and feeling like they had failed to advocate on their family member’s behalf. Relatives told us they had not been involved in regular care plan reviews and that, although initially felt involved in care planning, no longer did; they told us communication with the provider was poor.