19 October 2017
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Patmark Gentle Care Limited was registered with the Care Quality Commission 8 June 2017. To enable us to rate a service and answer the five questions is the service; safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led, we need at least six months. This allows for Patmark Gentle Care Limited to establish and embed their policies and procedures, and for us to gain an overview on how the service has been running / developing over a period of time. However due to concerns we received from the Commissioners of the service, and following a meeting with the provider’s representatives on the 17 October 2017, we were not confidant that people were receiving a safe service. Therefore we carried out a focused inspection on 19 October 2017 to review two areas of the service; Safe and Well led.
During the inspection we found that the registered provider was in breach of multiple regulations of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.
There was a registered manager in post. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.
We found that the provider was unable to demonstrate that they had robust systems in place to ensure people were receiving safe care and support. In addition their oversight and governance arrangements did not support the effective running of the service.
A breakdown in the working relationship and trust within the leadership team, had resulted in a blame culture, and impacted on their ability to put effective action in place. People were at risk of harm due to missed and/or late visits, untrained/inexperienced staff, unsafe recruitment processes and a failure to fully assess the risks related to people’s complex needs.
As a result we took immediate urgent action to the provider regulated activity for three months, to give them an opportunity to make improvements and not placing people at risk from receiving inappropriate or unsafe care. Essex County Council have since supported all those using the service to move to an alternative provider. We will continue to review this service and the suspension.