De Vere Care Partnership -Chelmsford

Updated 27 February 2024

De Vere Care Partnership – Chelmsford is a domiciliary care agency providing care and support to people living in their own homes. Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. At the time of our assessment the service supported 195 people with personal care. We reviewed 12 quality statements; Safeguarding; Involving people to manage risks; Safe and effective staffing; Medicines optimisation; Consent to care and treatment; Assessing needs; How staff, teams and services work together; Independence, choice and control; Workforce wellbeing and enablement; Compassionate and inclusive leaders; Freedom to speak up; Governance, management and sustainability. We found two breaches of the legal regulations in relation to safe and effective staffing and governance. The provider’s oversight of call monitoring did not consistently demonstrate there were enough suitably qualified staff to meet people’s needs. Governance systems and audits were not effective in identifying or addressing areas for improvement. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.

Updated 27 February 2024

Overall people were positive about the care they received, and a person told us, “The [staff] are very, very good. They’re all punctual. Nine times out of ten they ask you if there’s anything else you want.“ Another person said, “All the staff are lovely very kind and polite. I enjoy their company and wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t have them.” While the people we spoke with expressed that they were generally happy with their care, our assessment found elements of care did not meet the expected standards. We did have some feedback from people about the timings of calls and some people found staff did not always stay the right amount of time. A person told us, "We really don't know what time the staff should be arriving, but they seem to do most of the things but in just 15 minutes."