Last updated 6 June 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.

The inspection visit took place on 25 April 2018 and was announced. We gave the agency two days’ notice of the inspection visit because the management team are often out of the office supporting staff or providing care. We needed to be sure that they would be in. This was a routine comprehensive inspection carried out by one adult social care 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.

Inspection site visit activity started on 25 April and ended on 27 April 2018. Two days after the inspection visit we phoned people who used the service and their relatives and spoke with two people who used the service and three relatives

We contacted 10 health and social care professionals and received responses from two of them.

We spoke with five staff which included the registered manager, duty managers, administrator and care staff.

We used information the provider sent us in the Provider Information Return (PIR). This is information we require providers to send us at least once annually to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. We reviewed the information in the PIR along with information we held about the agency, such as notifications. A notification is information about important events which the service is required to tell us about by law.

We looked at two people’s care folders, health and safety and the monitoring of quality. We looked at agency had collected about the quality of service using surveys of people, their relatives, staff and professionals. We also looked at information relating to staff training and records of staff meetings. We reviewed policies which related to the running of the agency. We looked at five evidence folders which the registered manager had compiled to demonstrate how the service was delivering care. The folders were aligned to the five domains (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well-led) CQC uses to assess a service.