Dimensions South West Counties Domiciliary Care Office

Updated 13 March 2025

Date of inspection: 18 March to 15 April 2025. The inspection was carried out because of concerns received in relation to some of the supported living houses. The service is a supported living service providing personal care support to 53 people with learning disabilities and autistic people across 32 houses in the counties of Wiltshire, Bath and Bristol.

We assessed the service against ‘right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgements about whether the provider guaranteed and demonstrated that people with a learning disability, and autistic people, are considered with respect, equality, dignity, choices, independence and access to local communities that most people take for granted.

People had comprehensive support plans in place that enabled staff to ensure people were engaging in their community and were able to make choices about what they wanted to do.

Leaders had a clear vision and culture based on person centred support, recognising the need to ensure staff also had this value base. Many of the services were successfully doing this. However, 1 of the services we visited was not following the principles of ‘right care, right support, right culture’. People were not being involved in many aspects of daily living; Leaders had failed to identify the issues in this service which meant people had been exposed to risk of harm.

Medicines were not always being managed safely. However, during the inspection period this was discussed with the provider who took steps to address the issues identified.

Updated 13 March 2025

We spoke to 11 out of the 53 people receiving personal care support and 5 relatives and visited 7 homes. People told us they felt well supported and liked the staff. One person told us they were “very happy living here”. Another person told us they “liked the team of staff” that worked with them.

Most relatives told us they felt people were well supported. One relative stated they felt the support was “excellent” and the staff team were “very good”. Another relative said “the team provides high quality and effective care”. However, some relatives felt people were not always supported in line with person centred approaches and that staff sometimes did not encourage people to do things that took effort. One relative told us staff knew they needed to use some specific techniques to encourage the person they were supporting to choose do activities however, staff did not use these techniques meaning the person then chose to do nothing.