Last updated 9 January 2018
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

This inspection took place on 3 October 2017 and was unannounced and was conducted by one inspector and an expert by experience. An expert by experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service. This person’s area of expertise was being a carer for an older person who use regulated services.

The provider completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make.

We reviewed information we held about the provider, in particular, any notifications about accidents, incidents, safeguarding matters or deaths. We asked the local authority for their views about the service provided. We used the information that we had gathered to plan what areas we were going to focus on during our inspection. We spoke with eight people who lived at the service and four relatives. We spoke with the registered manager, the area manager, five members of care staff, and the chef.

We used the Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI). SOFI is a way of observing care to help us understand the experience of people who could not talk with us.

We reviewed a range of documents and records including the care records of three people using the service, four medication administration records, two staff files, training records, complaints systems, compliments, minutes of meetings, activity records and programmes, surveys, quality audits and action plans.