- Care home
St Mary's Care Home
We placed conditions on SUSAH Middlesbrough Ltd on 24 March 2026 for failing to meet the regulations related to good governance and consent at St Mary’s Care Home. The conditions we have placed stops St Mary’s Care Home admitting people with a learning disability and autistic people and requires managers to send regular progress reports to us.
Assessment report published 25 June 2025
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of Assessment: 12 February to 12 May 2025. St Mary’s Care Home is registered to provide nursing and residential care. However, the service has never provided nursing care. The provider originally registered the service to provide support for people who were living with dementia, mental health needs or physical disabilities. They later added support of people with a learning disability or autism. At the time of this inspection, 53 people were living at the service with 35 people described as having a learning disability or autism.
We assessed the service against ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgements about whether the provider guaranteed people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted.
When the provider changed to a specialist service for people with learning disability or autism, this had not been reflected in the design of the service, staff practice and the environment. Neither the registered manager nor staff understood the principles of right care, right support and right culture or any best practice guidance of working with people who had a learning disability or autism. The provider governance arrangements had not identified action was needed to ensure the service changed and effectively supported this specialism.
Staff were empathetic and kind, they were attentive and consistently engaged people in conversation. For most people the service met their needs. However, people with needs related to their learning disability or autism did not always get their needs met and would sit unoccupied for long-periods of time.
Initially there were insufficient staff to provide individualised support for people but during the inspection the provider employed more staff and changed the shift patterns. Despite these improvements, we continued to find staff were not meeting the needs of people whose presenting need was their learning disability or autism.
Since starting the inspection, the provider has made positive changes to the environment to make this more appealing for the younger adults and installed a domestic kitchens and. However, the service still did not provide individualised support, which enabled people to lead meaningful goal-orientated lives.
At our last inspection in 2022 when the service predominantly supported older people, we rated the service as good. At this inspection we found the provider was in breach of legal regulations relating to providing person-centred care, the registered manager's skills to provide a specialist service and governance arrangements.
People's experience of this service
People who spoke with us were happy with the support provided at the service and spoke positively about how the staff treated them. They found staff extremely caring and supportive and complimented staff on how they provided a range of group activities and opportunities to go out. A person said, “The staff are excellent, and I love it here. They are always thinking of activities we can do and they have just put a kitchen in. I can’t wait to use it as was always good at cooking.” In general relatives were happy with the service. A relative said, “[Person’s name] attends day services Monday-Friday all day, so she doesn't do much in the care home in regards to activities.” Another relative said, “[Person’s name] has some mobility issues, so their activities are mainly inside the home, be that creating arts and crafts, having some beauty treatments, etc., both of which they enjoy a lot.”
We used a structured observation tool to assess whether people received good care. This observation showed when staff had time they were working with people in a sensitive, caring and considerate manner. However people who had limited verbal communication skills were not offered choices, predominantly sat in the lounges with older people who had dementia or their bedrooms and were not engaged in meaningful activities.