Bluebird Care (Southampton)

Updated 23 May 2023

The inspection

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (the Act) as part of our regulatory functions. We checked whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Act. We looked at the overall quality of the service and provided a rating for the service under the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

Inspection team

An inspector and an Expert by Experience carried out this inspection. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.

Service and service type

This service is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to people living in their own homes.

Registered Manager

This provider is required to have a registered manager to oversee the delivery of regulated activities at this location. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Registered managers and providers are legally responsible for how the service is run, for the quality and safety of the care provided and compliance with regulations.

At the time of our inspection there was not a registered manager in post. The provider’s care manager had recently submitted an application to register. We are currently assessing this application.

Notice of inspection

We gave a short period notice of the inspection so the provider could make sure people we wanted to speak with agreed to take part in our inspection.

Inspection activity started on 22 March 2023 and ended on 3 April 2023. We visited the location’s office on 27 March 2023.

What we did before the inspection

We reviewed information we had received about the service since the last inspection. We used the information the provider sent us in the provider information return (PIR). This is information providers are required to send us annually with key information about their service, what they do well, and improvements they plan to make. We used information gathered as part of monitoring activity that took place on 19 October 2022. We used all this information to plan our inspection.

During the inspection

We spoke with 5 people who used the service. We spoke with the manager and 7 members of staff.

We reviewed records relating to people’s care and the running of the service. These included care records for 5 people and 4 staff recruitment files.

Updated 23 May 2023

About the service

Bluebird Care (Southampton) is a home care service providing personal care to people in their own home. The service provides support to people with a range of personal care needs. At the time of our inspection there were 40 people using the service.

Not everyone who used the service received personal care. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided.

People’s experience of using this service and what we found

People’s feedback about the service was very positive and they reported good outcomes from the support received. A typical comment was, “The quality of the care is excellent.”

The provider had processes in place to keep people safe and manage risks, including risks around infection prevention and control. There were sufficient suitably skilled staff to support people safely. There were processes to manage people's medicines, and to protect people from the risk of abuse or poor care.

The service people received was well led. The service focused on person-centred care and good outcomes for people. There were effective systems in place to manage the service, improve the quality of care people received, and support staff to deliver high quality care. The provider had a clear vision for a “culture of excellence” working as “one family”.

For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Rating at last inspection

The last rating for this service was good (published 19 May 2020).

Why we inspected

This inspection was prompted by a review of the information we held about this service.

A recent monitoring activity did not gather all the information we needed about systems to keep people’s care records current and up to date. As a result, we undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led only.

For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating.

Follow up

We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.