Last updated 17 October 2018
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

The inspection took place on 10 September 2018 and was unannounced. The inspection team consisted of two inspectors; one assistant inspector; a specialist advisor who was a nurse with experience of providing nursing care to older people and an expert-by-experience. An expert-by-experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.

Before the inspection visit, we checked the information we held about the service and provider. The provider had completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service such as what the service does well and any improvements that they plan to make.

We reviewed other information we held about the service such as notifications. A notification tells us information about important events that by law the provider is required to inform us about. For example; safeguarding concerns, serious injuries and deaths that had occurred at the service. We also considered information we had received from other sources including the public, Healthwatch and commissioners of the service. Healthwatch are the independent national champion for people who use health and social care services. We used this information to help us plan our inspection.

We spoke with four people who used the service and three visiting relatives. We did this to gain people's views about the care and to check that standards of care were being met. We also spoke with 15 members of care staff, two nurses and the activities coordinator. We spoke with the deputy manager, the registered manager and the quality and compliance manager to help us to understand how the service was managed.

Some people who used the service were not able to speak with us about their care experiences so we observed how the staff interacted with people in communal areas and we used the Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI). SOFI is a specific way of observing care to help us understand the experience of people who could not talk with us. We looked at the care records of eight people who used the service, to see if their records were accurate and up to date. We also looked at records relating to the management of the service. These included six staff files, training records, incident reports, medicines administration records and quality assurance records.