Archived: The Gables Care Home

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

Caring – this means we looked for evidence that the service involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.

At our last assessment we rated this key question requires improvement. At this assessment the rating has remained requires improvement. This meant people were not always well-supported, cared for or treated with dignity and respect.

The service was in breach of legal regulation in relation to how people were not supported in a person-centred way and in relation to people being treated with dignity and respect.

This service scored 50 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Some of the failures we identified did not always match that of a kind and caring service that treated people with dignity as detailed throughout this report. Observations we witnessed throughout our onsite inspection between staff and people were that of a kind, caring and dignified manner.

People felt staff treated them with respect. One person said, “Yes they do treat me with respect, if they didn’t, I would tell them.” Staff spoke about how they treated people with kindness and dignity, one staff member said, “Staff are kind. I maintain dignity by being there whenever they (people) need me. I assist with food and encourage people to eat."

People and their relatives feedback about being treated as individuals was mixed. Whilst some people said they got to make choices around what time they went to bed and got up, other concerns were raised about a shared bedroom and the lack of choice around this, despite there being vacant rooms and an expression by family to request a single occupancy room. After this issue had been raised multiple times, on the second day of inspection the manager agreed to look into moving rooms, however a family member went to support with this possible room move and found another resident in their relatives room which caused the relative distress.

A relative also told us, “I keep buying her stuff (clothes) and she has stuff (clothes) that is not hers and we see other people in her (clothes). I put labels in, and we heard that they put all colours of clothes in together. She always looks clean. I once emptied her wardrobe as it had loads of other people’s clothes.”

During our walk around, we observed that people’s bedrooms were personalised with their chosen items such as photos and belongings important to them, but there were some concerns relating to other items stored in people’s rooms that should not have been there.

Staff told us “We get to know people by talking to them.” And that they “Know about people’s social and cultural needs by looking at care plans.” We did see some examples of people’s communication needs recorded in their care plan.

Feedback on activities was mixed. One relative said, “They do painting and drawing on certain days, I haven’t seen anything else.”, whilst one person told us, “There aren’t any (activities).” Staff we spoke with provided mixed feedback on activities, one staff member told us “We do dominoes, they like to watch TV and when it’s not too hot sit in the garden.” But that people “Never go out into the community.” Whilst another said, "No there is not enough activities. Our activities coordinator has been on leave for four weeks, she does need to do more than she has been doing and the manager is going to pick this up as she and others have noticed this. The previous manager picked this up as well but she didn’t stay long enough to do anything about it."

The service had an activity plan in place though we only witnessed soft ball throwing taking place once over 2 days, which did not align with what was advertised. People’s activity records in their care plans also indicated that people were not regularly taking part in activities.

Most people felt staff supported them to be independent where possible. One person told us, “I try to be independent but if I want help, they will help me.”

People and relatives felt staff did not always respond to people’s immediate needs. One relative told us, “I have spoken to staff and managers about certain things I saw when I visited, one gentleman was walking around with wet pants, the staff had noticed but didn’t do anything. That was before they got the new manager.”

A staff member told us how they look out for signs of pain if peoples are non-verbal they spoke about watching to see if people become restless/fidgety as a sign that they might be in pain.

We observed staff responding to people’s needs by supporting them with things such as mobilising and providing one-to-one support where required, though the manner/order in which some tasks were done were to support staff due to low staff numbers, rather than to provide support for people’s needs and preferences. At lunch time we also witnessed staff supporting people.

There was no dependency tool in place to help calculate staffing requirements to help support their wellbeing or workload. The manager told us that staff were not able to go out on their breaks as they were paid, however we found staff files contradicted this which left us uncertain how this supported staff wellbeing.

Staff told us they felt valued at work and told us they were “Treated well.” Various policies were in place to support staff wellbeing. Staff were able to raise concerns in various ways should they have any and through various channels.