Lifeways Community Care Limited (Leicestershire County)

Ratings

• Overall

  Inadequate

• Safe

  Inadequate

• Effective

  Inadequate

• Caring

  Inadequate

• Responsive

  Requires improvement

• Well-led

  Inadequate

Our view of the service

Date of inspection 3 April to 30 April 2025. The inspection was the provider’s first inspection of this location and was prompted due to concerns received about safe care and treatment and a lack of effective management oversight. We undertook a comprehensive inspection.

Lifeways Community Care Limited (Leicestershire County) provides personal care for people living in their own tenancies. The service provides support to autistic people and to people with learning disabilities. At the time of our inspection there were 23 people under the registered location.

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

We identified under the key questions Safe and Well Led the service was in breach of legal regulation in relation to safe care and treatment, medicines, safe and effective staffing, safeguarding, and good governance.

Risk management in relation to how people’s individual emotional and behavioural needs were assessed, planned for and mitigated were not sufficiently robust and at times meant people were not safe from harm. People with acute health conditions did not have their health needs managed safely. Staff were not always deployed to meet people’s needs. They lacked training, skills and knowledge to support people effectively to manage distressed behaviours and specific health care tasks. Safeguarding processes were not always followed, and incidents were not reported in line with the provider’s policy.

Leaders of the service did not have effective oversight, knowledge and understanding of people’s needs. Management of incidents was poor and did not lead to a culture of learning and improvement.

This service is being placed in special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we use our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a time-frame within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide.

People's experience of this service

We received mixed feedback from people and their relatives regarding the care and support people received. Most people and relatives raised concerns with the lack of provider oversight, staffing and poor quality of life for their family members. Two people told us they were unhappy with some staff members who supported them. One person said, “Staff can be a bit rude sometimes and the manager doesn’t listen to me”. Another person told us, “Staff are okay, I don’t like the ones that shout”. One relative said, “They are there to make money. Years ago, they had done day trips to the seaside, BBQ’s. They had a good quality of life. They have none at all now”. Another family member told us, “There’s not much communication. I never feel as if I am listened too. Nothing ever changes” and other relatives said, “No, not happy at all. [Name] has no quality of life. It all seems as long as they’re alive, that’s all they care about”.

We did also receive some positive comments and these included, “The standard of care is 110%. We have a very good relationship with them all”, “[Name] has never been so happy since living there. There is nothing that I would change”. We observed staff interacting with people to assess whether they received good care. Some people could not directly tell us about their experience. This approach showed some staff knew people well and were able to communicate with them in their preferred way, however at some residences staff lacked skills in meaningful and purposeful engagement and knowledge of people’s complex communication needs.