Higher Park Lodge

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

Caring – this means we looked for evidence that the provider involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.

At our last assessment, we rated this key question outstanding. At this assessment, the rating has changed to requires improvement. This meant people did not always feel well-supported, cared for or treated with dignity and respect.

The service was in breach of legal regulation in relation to maintaining people’s dignity and respect and providing person centred care.

This service scored 55 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The provider did not always treat people with kindness, empathy and compassion, or respect their privacy and dignity. Staff did not always treat colleagues from other organisations with kindness and respect.

Although in general comments on the staff were positive, some people responded that some staff were “not very nice”, and could be “brusque” and “off hand” in their manner. During our first assessment visit staff were seen gathered and smoking outside a person’s bedroom window which was neither respectful of the person’s privacy, or complied with the home’s policy on where staff should go to smoke. Another person who could not move themselves from their bed complained confused people, constantly came into their room and invaded their privacy, causing this person distress.

Some self-closing fire doors were not operating effectively which led to them slamming loudly. Some people told us that they had asked repeatedly for this distressing noise to stop but it had continued unchanged.

People were living in an environment that was not always clean and in places smelled unpleasant, this was not respectful of people’s home.

The provider did not always treat people as individuals or make sure people’s care, support and treatment met people’s needs and preferences. They did not always take account of people’s strengths, abilities, aspirations, culture and unique backgrounds and protected characteristics.

Although the home had a homely approach to providing care, there were elements where people’s individuality was not respected. For example, people were not supported to take part in activities they wanted to do, such as having individual activities when they could not easily leave their room.

The provider did not always promote people’s independence, so people did not always know their rights and have choice and control over their own care, treatment and wellbeing.

People were not made aware of their rights to be supported as they wished. People who could not enable their own choices because of their physical needs were not given choices. For example, some people were not encouraged and supported to leave their rooms.

The provider did not always listen to and understand people’s needs, views and wishes. Staff did not always respond to people’s needs in the moment or act to minimise any discomfort, concern or distress.

As identified elsewhere in this report, the amount of care staff time was identified by the service as insufficient, and this was leading to people’s needs not being met in a timely way. By the end of the assessment period the service was taking action to increase the amount of time available to provide care to people.

There was no means of communicating between staff when they needed support from colleagues, except to use the call bell system to obtain support, which delayed people receiving support. Managers said that an improved hand held computer system was being introduced that would allow staff to communicate to one another effectively to obtain more staff support in a different area of the service.

The provider cared about and promoted the wellbeing of their staff, and supported and enabled staff to deliver adequate care.

The service gave some additional financial incentives to staff. For example, by taking on a ‘Champion’ role in different areas of care. Also, a new payment system had been put in place where staff received enhanced pay when working extra hours to cover sickness. Care staff could progress to become a Senior member of care staff on an enhanced rate of pay. Staff reported to us that their morale was good.