St Ives Disabled Care Centre, Bingley, is rated as Inadequate by the Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has told Elder Homes Bingley LLP that they must make urgent improvements at St Ives Disabled Care Centre in Bingley in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people living there.

During an unannounced inspection in May this year inspectors found that the provider was failing to provide care which was safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs or well led. The service was previously rated as requires improvement following an inspection in November 2014.

Under CQC’s programme of inspections, all adult social care services are being given a rating to help people choose care. Overall, St Ives Disabled Care Centre has been rated as Inadequate, and will be placed into Special Measures.

A full report from the inspection has been published on the CQC website: www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-130824279.

The report highlights a number of areas of concern, including:

• There were insufficient staff to make sure the needs of people living at the home could be met in a timely manner.
• Checks carried out on staff as part of the provider's recruitment processes had not always been carried out to an appropriate standard before staff began work at the home.
• There was a lack of staff knowledge on how to identify or respond to the risk of abuse. There was a limited understanding amongst staff about the Mental Capacity Act (2005) which meant it was not consistently followed, and many of the staff had not received the appropriate training. As a result people were at risk of being denied their human rights.
• People’s nutritional needs were not always being met and inspectors were concerned that where people had lost, or gained, significant amounts of weight and were not supported to maintain their health, little or no action had been taken to address this.
• Information in care plans was poor, so staff had no clear instruction on how to best care for people living there or receive updates when a person’s needs changed.
• Complaints were not always being recorded and were not always resolved to a satisfactory conclusion. People’s feedback was not consistently sought, valued or acted upon.

Debbie Westhead, CQC’s Deputy Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care in the North, said:

“Whilst we saw some good caring interactions between staff and the people living at St Ives, we also saw many areas of serious concern of which many were unaddressed issues from our previous inspection of the service in November last year.

“It is unacceptable that the provider has allowed the service to deteriorate, the care we found fell a long way short of what we expect services to provide.

“We have told Elder Homes Bingley LLP that they must take action to resolve the issues we have identified as a priority and we are monitoring the situation closely in liaison with the local authority to ensure people are safe from any immediate risk.

“Because of our findings we are currently considering the need for further regulatory action against the service, to protect the rights of the people there, but due to legal reasons we cannot comment further at this stage."

Any regulatory decision that CQC takes is open to challenge by a registered person through a variety of internal and external appeal processes.

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