- Homecare service
St James Court
Assessment report published 8 September 2026
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment 4 July to 28 July 2026. We visited the extra care facility on the 16 July 2026. We continued to seek information and clarification from the service until 12 August 2026.
St James Court is registered to provide support with personal care. The main office is based within an extra care scheme of 12 flats. At the time of the assessment the service provided care and support to 10 people who lived at the scheme. Not everyone who lived at St James Court was receiving the regulated activity of personal care, which is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. We only reviewed the care and support for 2 people who were receiving the regulated activity of personal care.
We found 2 breaches of the legal regulations in relation to safe care and treatment and good governance at the service.
We found risks to people as a result of their medical conditions, or prescribed medicines were not routinely and consistently assessed or mitigated. This meant staff did not always have guidance on how to mitigate risks to people.
We found improvements were required to ensure medicines were managed safely. We found handwritten medicine administration records did not routinely record who had written the record or if it has been checked for accuracy by a second person as a good practice.
We identified areas for improvement relating to emergency preparedness, including emergency equipment readiness and fire safety training arrangements.
Governance systems were in place; however, they were not always effective in identifying and addressing the concerns found during this assessment.A registered manager was in post however; they were not based at the location. A manager provided oversight to the service; however, systems were not effective in driving improvement. The provider failed to ensure their policies were followed by staff. The provider expected a number of audits to be carried out over a 12-month period. However, we found this was not the case. The manager told us the only audit which was carried out regularly was a medicines audit. The medicines audit had failed to highlight the concerns we identified about medicines management.
We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 2 people who received support with personal care whilst onsite at St James Court.
The people told us they were happy with the care staff. This was supported by our observations of how staff interacted with them. One person’s face clearly lit up when a member of staff was close by to them.
Relatives told us the support their family members received had improved following them raising concerns with the service.
People and relatives told us staff were familiar to them and they respected them.