Mercie Grace

Mercie Grace provides care to people living in their own homes. 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 inspection, 87 people were receiving a service.

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ is the guidance CQC follows to make assessment and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it.

Right Support: Care plans and risk assessments provided staff with guidance of how to provide safe care and support and mitigate known risks. However, care plans were not consistently kept up to date when changes occurred.

People were supported with their prescribed medicines. The provider had taken some actions to make improvements to medicines management and further actions were required. We made a recommendation about medicines management.

People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; the policies and systems in the service supported this practice.

Overall, care calls were delivered within the time expected, by a regular core group of staff, who stayed for the duration of the call.

Staff had been recruited safely, and staff received an induction, training and ongoing support. Additional staff training in learning disability and autism was required and the registered manager took immediate action during the inspection to arrange this.

Right Care: People were positive about the kind, caring and respectful approach of care staff. People were involved as fully as possible in discussions and decisions about their care.

Where required, people were supported with eating and drinking. People’s health was monitored, and action was taken if a person’s health needs changed.

People received care and support based on their individual needs, routines and preferences. People’s diverse needs were considered and met. This included their individual communication needs and preferences.

People had access to the provider’s complaint procedure. Complaints and incidents were investigated, and actions taken to make improvements.

Right Culture: There was a positive staff culture and partnership working with external agencies. The provider sought and valued feedback from people and staff.

The providers systems and processes were not always effective in helping to identify where improvements were required. However, improvements had been made and were ongoing in developing staff roles and responsibilities.

For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk

Rating at last inspection

The last rating for the service was requires improvement (published 19 June 2021). Since this rating was awarded the provider has altered its legal entity and premises. We have used the previous rating to inform our planning and decisions about the rating at this inspection.

Why we inspected

This inspection was prompted by a review of the information we held about this service.

Enforcement

We have identified a breach in regulation in relation to the governance of the service.

Please see the action we have told the provider to take at the end of this report.

Follow up

We will request an action plan from the provider to understand what they will do to improve the standards of quality and safety. We will work alongside the provider and local authority to monitor progress. We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.