The Care Quality Commission
  • Community
  • Community substance misuse service

Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service - Tower Hamlets

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

183-185 Whitechapel Road, London, E1 1DN (020) 3889 951

Provided and run by:
Change, Grow, Live

All Inspections

During an assessment of Substance misuse services

Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service – Tower Hamlets is part of the larger Change Grow Live provider who deliver a not-for-profit drug and alcohol treatment service nationally. The service provides specialist community treatment and recovery support for adults affected by substance misuse who live in Tower Hamlets. The service provides treatment support service from a main site on Whitechapel Road and a satellite site on Johnson Street.

Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service – Tower Hamlets offer a range of services including initial advice; assessment and harm reduction services including needle exchange; prescribed medicines for alcohol and opiate detoxification and stabilisation; naloxone dispensing; one-to-one key working sessions and doctor and nurse clinics which include health checks, blood borne virus and hepatitis C testing.

The service works in partnership across Tower Hamlets with other agencies, including NHS services, social services, probation services, GPs and pharmacies.

The service is registered for the following regulated activity: Treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

As a result of this inspection, we rated each of the five key questions and the service overall as good.

The service continues to demonstrate good practice in several areas. People described staff as kind, respectful and supportive, and said the service had a positive impact on their lives. They valued flexible appointments, tailored interventions and practical help such as housing and health support. Staff training compliance for safeguarding and basic life support is high, and leaders have strengthened oversight of contact and review arrangements. Policies and pathways support safe care, and audits showed high compliance with prescription security and benzodiazepine prescribing standards. Infection prevention and control audits were strong, and governance systems supported incident reporting and shared learning.

However, there were some areas where good practise improvements could be made. For example the use of patient group directives needed strengthening. Some staff had high caseloads. Some rooms were not sufficiently sound proofed. At the time of our inspection, the service was not meeting its own targets for the number of people successfully completing programmes.

During an assessment of the hospital overall

Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service – Tower Hamlets is part of the larger Change Grow Live provider who deliver a not-for-profit drug and alcohol treatment service nationally. The service provides specialist community treatment and recovery support for adults affected by substance misuse who live in Tower Hamlets. The service provides treatment support service from a main site on Whitechapel Road and a satellite site on Johnson Street.

Reset Treatment and Recovery Support Service – Tower Hamlets offer a range of services including initial advice; assessment and harm reduction services including needle exchange; prescribed medicines for alcohol and opiate detoxification and stabilisation; naloxone dispensing; one-to-one key working sessions and doctor and nurse clinics which include health checks, blood borne virus and hepatitis C testing.

The service works in partnership across Tower Hamlets with other agencies, including NHS services, social services, probation services, GPs and pharmacies.

The service is registered for the following regulated activity: Treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

As a result of this inspection, we rated each of the five key questions and the service overall as good.

The service continues to demonstrate good practice in several areas. People described staff as kind, respectful and supportive, and said the service had a positive impact on their lives. They valued flexible appointments, tailored interventions and practical help such as housing and health support. Staff training compliance for safeguarding and basic life support is high, and leaders have strengthened oversight of contact and review arrangements. Policies and pathways support safe care, and audits showed high compliance with prescription security and benzodiazepine prescribing standards. Infection prevention and control audits were strong, and governance systems supported incident reporting and shared learning.

However, there were some areas where good practise improvements could be made. For example the use of patient group directives needed strengthening. Some staff had high caseloads. Some rooms were not sufficiently sound proofed. At the time of our inspection, the service was not meeting its own targets for the number of people successfully completing programmes.

22 and 23 February 2022

During a routine inspection

The service provides specialist community treatment and support for adults affected by substance misuse who live in Tower Hamlets. This was our first comprehensive inspection of this service.

We rated it as good because:

  • The premises where clients were seen were clean and well equipped. Staff responded promptly to sudden deterioration in service users’ physical and mental health. Staff made service users aware of harm minimisation and the risks of continued substance misuse. Staff followed good practice with respect to safeguarding.
  • Staff developed holistic, recovery-oriented care plans informed by a comprehensive assessment. They provided a range of treatments suitable to the needs of the service users.
  • The teams included or had access to the full range of specialists required to meet the needs of service users under their care. Managers ensured that these staff received training, supervision and appraisal. Staff worked well together as a multidisciplinary team and relevant services outside the organisation.
  • Staff treated service users with compassion and kindness and understood the individual needs of service users. They actively involved service users in decisions and care planning.
  • The service was easy to access. Staff planned and managed discharge well.
  • The service was well led, and the governance processes ensured that its procedures ran smoothly.

However:

  • Improvements were needed to the environment. At Whitechapel Road there were not enough rooms to meet with clients and those that were available were not appropriately sound proofed. Whilst additional cleaning procedures were in place to protect people from COVID-19, poor record keeping meant that it was not clear that these always took place.
  • Staff did not consistently wear their personal alarms. In one room at the Whitechapel Road site a wall alarm was blocked by furniture. The service user toilet at the Whitechapel Road site did not have a call alarm. There were no records kept on site demonstrating regular and consistent alarm testing.
  • Not all staff had completed basic life support training.
  • The number of service users on the caseload of some recovery coordinators was too high, preventing staff from maintaining regular contact for 506 (28%) service users.
  • The service had 203 (29%) clients receiving medication assisted treatment with medical reviews that were overdue.