Jewel Home Care

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

Caring – this means we looked for evidence that the provider involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.

This is the first assessment for this newly registered service. This key question has been rated requires improvement. This meant people did not always feel well-supported, cared for or treated with dignity and respect.

This service scored 40 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The provider did not always treat people with kindness, empathy and compassion, or respect their privacy and dignity.

Not everyone experienced good quality, person centred care delivered kindly by staff. A person told us, “I have been having carers from Jewel for 2 years, but I did stop for a while. I left because some of the carers were rough, but the [staff] from the new agency were even rougher so I came back.” However, 1 person commented, “[Staff] are lovely, friendly and kind.”

Feedback from people was that they usually felt rushed by staff, and staff were under pressure to rush off to their next care visit. This did not support staff to be able to deliver kind and compassionate care.

The provider did not always treat people as individuals or make sure people’s care, support and treatment met people’s needs and preferences. They did not always take account of people’s strengths, abilities, aspirations, culture and unique backgrounds and protected characteristics.

A relative told us staff could go down a checklist of tasks but could not provide personalised care. Concerns were also raised about staff not being able to deliver more than basic care due to time restraints and a lack of empathy.

A relative stated, “There is no thought about [relative’s] personal need – the only thought is about their business needs. I had to give up my job to look after [relative] but I want to carry on with the agency because at least I am getting some help. We give very basic jobs to the care agency.”

Care plans did not always include detailed information about people’s cultural, religious or spiritual needs, and improvement was required in sections pertaining to people’s preferred communication methods.

The provider did not always promote people’s independence, so people did not always know their rights and have choice and control over their own care, treatment and wellbeing.

People and relatives told us they were mostly offered choice and had control over the decisions being made by care staff. However, we found where people lacked capacity or had limited ability to communicate verbally, there was a lack of use of tools or technology to promote people’s independence.This meant staff did not have all the necessary information to enable them to continue to promote people’s independence.

Staff records, and care visit records did not reflect staff were given enough time to allow people to be truly independent in their care and support, due to short, late and overlapping calls scheduled by the provider.

The provider did not always listen to and understand people’s needs, views and wishes. Staff did not always respond to people’s needs in the moment or act to minimise any discomfort, concern or distress.

The provider failed to operate a robust system to ensure staff carried out calls to people as scheduled. We received feedback of late calls, short calls, and calls in which staff left tasks unfinished.

We also heard feedback from a relative where staff had failed to comfort a person’s distress. The relative explained, “I have raised concerns with [Jewel Homecare] after someone rang me to say they had seen [my family member] crying in town (whilst being supported by staff).”

One person required a Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) plan, to provide guidance for staff on how to monitor distress levels, and strategies they could implement to prevent the person’s distress escalating to a degree which may cause harm to either themselves, or others. Whilst the provider did have a PBS plan in place, it was not easy to find for staff and did not support staff to have quick access to this information when the person started to become heightened. The delay in staff being able to locate the required information, meant a potential delay in staff using the right strategies to support the person to feel calmer. We raised this with the provider, who acknowledged this and agreed to move the information to a more prominent location.

The provider did not care about or promote the wellbeing of their staff. They did not support or enable staff to deliver person-centred care.

We received a significant number of detailed concerns during the inspection of this service. We followed these up and identified the majority of the issues raised to be relevant and impactful on service delivery. This meant staff did not feel supported and safe to speak up regarding their legitimate concerns.

Staff supervisions and appraisals were not always completed, or where these had been completed, did not enquire as to the staff member’s overall wellbeing.

Rotas were found to be predominantly inconsistent, with some staff working a lot of hours some weeks, and minimal hours the other weeks.

We were not advised of any staff reward or recognition schemes.

We did see some evidence of support delivered to staff by the deputy manager.