Updated 17 January 2020
The inspection
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (the Act) as part of our regulatory functions. We checked whether the provider was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Act. We looked at the overall quality of the service and provided a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.
Inspection team
This consisted of two inspectors and three Experts by Experience. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of service.
Service and service type
Care Solutions Bureau CIC is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to people living in their own homes.
The service had a manager registered with the Care Quality Commission. This means that they and the provider are legally responsible for how the service is run and for the quality and safety of the care provided.
Notice of inspection
We gave the provider 48 hours’ notice because we needed to ensure somebody would be available to assist us with the inspection.
Inspection activity started on 3 December and ended on 23 December 2019. We visited the office location on 3, 4, 5 and 11 December 2019 to see the registered manager, office staff and to review care records and policies and procedures. Experts by Experience made calls to people and their relatives between 5 and 6 December 2019. We made calls to care workers between 6 and 13 December 2019.
What we did before the inspection
We reviewed information we had received about the service since the last inspection. This included any significant incidents that occurred at the service. The provider was not asked to complete a provider information return prior to this inspection. This is information we require providers to send us to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. We took this into account when we inspected the service and made the judgements in this report. We contacted the local authority commissioning team and reviewed their recent monitoring visit report. We also reviewed the previous inspection report. We used all of this information to plan our inspection.
During the inspection
We reviewed a range of records. This included 22 people’s care and medicines records and 11 staff files in relation to recruitment, training and supervision. We also reviewed records related to the management of the service, which included quality assurance checks, complaints, incidents and accidents and minutes of team meetings.
We spoke with 21 staff members. This included the registered manager and the nominated individual. The nominated individual is responsible for supervising the management of the service on behalf of the provider. We also spoke with the operations manager, a risk assessor, the compliance manager and 14 care workers.
We made calls to 130 people and spoke with 18 people and 26 relatives.
After the inspection
We continued to seek clarification from the provider to validate evidence found. We reviewed samples of electronic call monitoring (ECM) data and care worker rotas. We also spoke with two health and social care professionals who had experience of working with the service.