Archived: John Munroe Community Support Services

During this inspection we spoke with one person who used the service, five members of care staff, the office manager and the locality manager. The person who used the service had communication difficulties, but was able to confirm that they were happy with the care they received.

During this inspection we saw that improvements had been made in the support given to staff. Staff told us they received supervision and appraisals and we found that staff had received training to enable them to meet people's needs.

We found that people were at risk of receiving unsafe and inconsistent care, because the required assessments and plans were not always completed. Professional advice was not always incorporated into people's support plans and we could not be assured that people received the care that had been recommended by professionals.

Effective systems were not in place to consistently assess and monitor the quality of the service. This meant that problems with people's care were not being identified by the manager or provider.

The relative told us that they were satisfied with the care provided and said 'the staff are very good and understand what X wants, they tend to spend more time than they are paid,. The staff told us that there was always someone on call they could contact and felt supported by the locality manager.

We were told by the staff that the locality manager had carried out a monthly visit to each person using the service to discuss and plan support goals for the next month. We saw no evidence of the meetings or changes to the support plan on the case files kept at the office.

Case files for people using the service held insufficient evidence for review of the care plan and risk assessments. Many documents were not placed on the file. Some documents had missing data or had not been dated and signed making the review of care provided more difficult.

Personnel files contained insufficient evidence of staff training. The staff we spoke to said that training was being planned for them since the locality manager had started.

We found that there was no system in place for assessing and monitoring the quality of care provided.

We have asked the provider to send us a report by the 4th March 2013, setting out the action they will take to meet the standards.