Sahara Parkside

Updated 25 February 2025

The assessment was carried out with two visits to the service on 19 and 28 March 2025. Sahara Parkside is a service providing accommodation and personal care to people with a range of needs including people with learning disabilities, autistic people and people with physical disabilities. The service has 10 flats and at the time of our visits 17 people were being supported.

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and access to communities that most people take for granted. ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ is a guidance CQC follows to make assessments and judgements about services supporting people which providers must adhere to. The last rating in December 2021 for this service was good.

We had previously inspected the service in October 2021, when we rated the safe, effective, caring and responsive domains as good. We had rated well led as requires improvement. Overall, we had rated the service good. During this assessment we reviewed all domains and our ratings for the service changed. We rated safe and well as requires improvement. We rated effective, caring and responsive as good. Overall, we rated the service as requires improvement. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.

We found breaches of Regulation 17, Good governance and Regulation 12 Safe care and treatment. There was no registered manager in post at the time of our assessment which meant there was lack of leadership. The provider’s systems and processes were not always effective in assessing, monitoring and improving the quality of the service. There was also a lack of training in managing violence and aggression and records about how to manage individual’s risk were not up to date.

We also found the provider had enough staff working flexibly across flats within the building to deliver support to people that met their care needs. Each flat was for 3 people and all were modernised, fully accessible with each bedroom having an en-suite wet room. People were supported to have choice and control and were protected from harm and abuse. Processes to record incidents and accidents were in place and lessons learnt each time drove future learning.

People were treated with kindness and compassion and interactions indicated relationships between people supported and staff were genuine and positive

The staff and management were able to describe the values, ethos and attitudes that created the right culture within the service. There was a willingness to learn when things went wrong and an acknowledgement that the service may not suit everyone and where applicable the provider worked in partnership with others to find a suitable alternative accommodation.

Updated 25 February 2025

People told us they felt safe in their homes. The families we spoke to told us their relatives were safe. One family member said there could be more activities, they told us, “It could be more consistent, I complained and was told it was about funding, but it has improved recently.”

People told us about the things they liked to do and the range of activities they enjoyed in their local community and also about using public transport to go further afield to do other things that interested them.

Families we spoke to told us that people’s health needs were met. One family member said, “They get in touch if [person] is unwell. Staff support [person] to the GP when they are unwell, they can tell when something is wrong.”

Whilst family and carer feedback was largely positive, there was mixed feedback about how the provider communicated with families. Where there were conflicting views between the provider and families, we heard from both parties about the solutions that were being explored to address these.