Archived: Surrey Helping Hands Limited

Updated 12 August 2025

Date of Assessment: 28 August 2025 to 20 November 2025. Surrey Helping Hands is a domiciliary care agency that provides personal care to people in their own homes. People who receive a service including older people, mobility needs and health conditions including dementia. At the time of our inspection the service provided personal care to 20 people.

An assessment has been undertaken of a service that is used by autistic people or people with a learning disability but is not registered as a specialist service. We have assessed the service against ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgments 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.

The provider was previously in breach of the legal regulation in relation to the management of risk associated with people’s care and the lack of robust governance. Sufficient improvements were not found at this assessment, and the provider remained in breach of these regulations. We also identified a breach of regulation related to the deployment of staff.

Care plans lacked detailed information on the level of risks for people and there was no clear guidance for staff about how to provide people’s care. Staff, however, were knowledgeable on how to support people safely. The provider failed to include travel time in between calls and, as a result, calls were often cut short to allow staff to travel to their next call. Rotas however showed staff always attended the calls. People received their medicines as prescribed. However there was information missing from people’s medicines records. Staff received mandatory training; however this did not cover all the needs of the people using the service.

Governance systems did not always enable the provider to identify where quality and/or safety were being compromised to ensure they could respond appropriately and without delay. The provider’s auditing systems had not identified all shortfalls we found during this inspection which meant opportunities to improve the safety of the service were missed. Staff did say they felt supported by the management team.

Updated 12 August 2025

People told us they felt safe when staff supported them. People and their relatives told us they had been involved in discussions about their or their family members’ care when their package of care started. People and relatives were sent surveys; however, action was needed to ensure these were accessible to everyone. People told us they felt confident any concerns they had would be resolved.

People told us staff attended their care calls as planned. We received mixed feedback from people in relation to the consistency of their staff team. Some people told us they had a regular staff team, but others told us they wanted more consistency. Without exception all people and relatives we spoke with told us staff were kind, caring and respectful.