- Care home
Mount Ephraim House
Assessment report published 25 November 2025
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment: 7 to 14 August 2025. The service is a residential home providing accommodation and personal care for older people and people living with dementia. The service can support 57 people. There were 45 people living at the service at the time of inspection.
This service was registered in May 2023, and this was the first inspection. We found the provider was in breach of 4 legal regulations. These related to consent to care and treatment, safe care and treatment, good governance and staffing.
Potential risks to people’s health and welfare had not been consistently assessed and there was not always guidance for staff to follow. The provider was not following the Mental Capacity Act 2005 when assessing people’s capacity and ability to make decisions. The systems to monitor the quality of the service were not effective. Medicine records were not always accurate and medicines guidance for staff was not always in place. There were vacancies in the staff teams, and these were regularly being filled with agency staff which people told us had impacted on the care they had been receiving. Staff had not always received the training and supervision to carry out their roles and support their well-being.
Some people’s care records provided staff with individual detail about them, using a person-centred approach, however this was inconsistent, and some people did not benefit from this. People and relatives felt they were not listened to when they raised concerns and improvements were not made.
People told us they felt safe, and they received appropriate support.
People's experience of this service
People’s feedback on the care and support received was mixed. They felt that the provider’s permanently employed staff cared for them in an appropriate way but told us the overreliance on agency staff impacted on the quality of care they received. People and their relatives did not feel there were enough staff to meet their needs, especially at evenings and weekends and some told us this had impacted on their care.
People did not always feel there was enough things to do through the day and some felt activities did not meet their personal preferences.
People and their relatives told us they had concerns with current management changes, with the previous registered manager leaving and interim managers being in place and then moving on. They said this led to communication not being as effective as it should be. Many people did not know who the manager was or who to go to if they felt they needed to raise a concern.
People told us the food they received was not always up to standard, and this was heavily dependent on who had prepared and cooked it that day. People felt they had not been listened to when their concerns had been raised.
People felt safe living at the service and when staff attended to them, treated them well, with respect and in a dignified way.