Mill View 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 provider involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect. At our last assessment we rated this key question good. At this assessment the rating has remained good. This meant people were supported and treated with dignity and respect; and involved as partners in their care.

This service scored 65 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The provider always treated people with kindness, empathy and compassion and respected their privacy and dignity. Staff treated colleagues from other organisations with kindness and respect.

Overall, people and relatives told us the majority of staff were kind, caring and knew people’s needs. One person stated, “Most of the staff are caring and patient. The core staff know us well.” Another person said, “The staff have been very helpful, couldn’t be better.” Whilst a third person told us, “It was my birthday recently, they [staff provider] put on a party for me which they paid for. It was such a lovely day.” Staff were able to tell us how they maintained people’s privacy and dignity whilst providing care. This included ensuring doors and curtains were closed when providing personal care, offering people choices and seeking their consent before providing support.

We did not look at Treating people as individuals during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.

The provider did not always promote people’s independence, so people did not always know their rights and have choice and control over their own care, treatment and wellbeing. This was especially relevant in relation to the provision of personal care and meeting people’s recreational needs.

Staff told us why they strove to ensure people’s independence was promoted, due to how busy they were, this was not always possible. One stated, “I try to support residents to support themselves when eating, dressing etc, but this can be difficult due to the lack of time we have as carers to ensure everyone is up and ready for the day.”

From reviewing hygiene charts, we noted the support people received with various aspects of personal hygiene fluctuated across the home. On one specific unit, we looked at records for 9 people and found the majority had only had 1 bath or shower in the last 28 days, their hair had only been washed on 1 occasion also. Both nail and oral care was also completed inconsistently. Feedback we received from some relatives also supported our findings. One relative told us, “Some residents have long nails and look unkempt with straggling hair. Dad is not always clean and well presented.” We found support with hygiene tasks on other units to be more frequent.

People and relatives told us there was very little activity provision within the home. Comments included, “There are no activities here, but there are occasional posters for an event, such as a singer. Dad just seems to walk round and round all day”, “There are no daily activities. There's only the TV with residents sitting there doing nothing. Mum is bored. She's just sits in a chair all day long” and “There are no activities. I can’t remember the last time we had a singer on. No bingo, no karaoke. I sit in my room all day as I don’t want to go in the lounge where they are all just asleep.”

The provider had recently employed 2 activity coordinators, who were still completing their induction so had yet to commence the role. In the interim, we were told staff were responsible for supporting activity completion. However, staff told us they did not have time to do this, which our observations supported.

The provider did not always listen to and understand people’s needs, views and wishes. Staff did not always respond to people’s needs in the moment or act to minimise any discomfort, concern or distress.

The majority of staff interactions we observed during our onsite visits were positive. However, care was task orientated, with staff quickly moving from one person to another or one care intervention to the next. Whilst this ensured people’s key needs were usually met, for example continence care, it did mean there was limited staff interaction with people. One staff member told us, “We never get around to doing the things that attracted me to the role in the first place like caring and chatting with residents.” A relative stated, “I have a good relationship with the staff, but they never seem to have time to chat with me about [relative]. They seem to be run ragged.” Another said, “Staff have told me they get frustrated with not having enough time to chat or do interesting things with residents.”

The providers electronic care planning and monitoring system collected data on care interventions and how often these had been met. We looked at one weeks’ worth of data, which showed of the 6439 care interventions provided, 1101 of these were completed later than scheduled. We also noted 550 planned tasks or actions, which could be support with personal care, pressure relief or continence care had been missed completely. Both sets of data show people’s needs were not consistently met.

The provider promoted the wellbeing of their staff. The provider operated a number of initiatives aimed at staff wellbeing and recognition. One of these was called, “B’Happie”, which was aimed at ensuring people living at the home and staff were as happy as possible. For staff, this would be achieved by ensuring they had a core purpose, which was celebrating people and having a positive impact on their daily lives, ensuring staff’s contributions were recognised and that they felt part of a team and belonged. In line with this, the provider acknowledged both good practice and length of service with awards.

The provider also told us about other initiatives. All Advinia employees have access to a host of employee benefits which include their employee assistance programme. This programme offers employees with assistance on things such as legal advice, counselling services and support networks. Further to this, the Advinia app hosts a range of benefits including cycle to work schemes, retail discounts and special offers available to employees.