Eccleshare Court

Updated 17 February 2018

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

We visited Eccleshare Court on 14 December 2017 and our comprehensive inspection was unannounced. Our inspection team consisted of an Inspection manager and an Inspector.

At our last inspection on 4 October 2016 the home was rated ‘Requires Improvement’. At this inspection we found the home was ‘Good’.

In preparation for, and as part of this inspection we reviewed information that we held about the home. This included information the registered persons sent us in their ‘provider information return.’ This is information we require providers to send us at least once annually to give some key information about the service, what the service did well and improvements they plan to make.

We reviewed notifications of incidents that the registered persons had sent us since they had been registered with us. These are events that happened in the home that the registered persons are required to tell us about. We also looked at information that had been sent to us by other organisations and agencies such as the local authority who commissioned services from the registered persons and the local authority safeguarding team.

During our inspection we spent time observing how staff provided care for people to help us better understand their experiences of the care they received. This was because some of the people who lived at the home had difficulties with their memory and were unable to directly tell us about their experiences of living there. In order to do this we used the Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI). SOFI is a way of observing care to help us understand the experiences of people who could not speak with us.

We spoke with six people who lived in the home, two visiting family members, an external activity provider, the registered persons area manager, two nurses who were employed by the home, eight members of the care staff team, two activity co-ordinators, the cook, four of the domestic staff team and the homes the maintenance staff member.

We looked at a range of documents, policies and written records. These included care records for five people, six staff recruitment records, 37 medicine administration records, the controlled drugs book and six staff recruitment records. We also looked at information related to the auditing and monitoring of the overall service provision.

Updated 17 February 2018

We carried out this inspection on 14 December 2017. Our inspection was unannounced.

Eccleshare Court is a ‘care home’. People in care homes receive accommodation and nursing or personal care as single package under one contractual agreement. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates both the premises and the care provided, and both were looked at during this inspection. The home is registered to provide accommodation and nursing care for up to 46 people, including older people and people living with dementia. There were 37 people living in the home at the time of our inspection.

The service was run by a company who was the registered provider. The home had a registered manager in post. The registered manager was not available at the time of this inspection but the registered persons area manager was present and they provided the information we required. A registered manager is a person who has registered with CQC to manage the service. Like registered providers (‘the provider’) they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run. In this report when we speak both about the company the area manager and the registered manager we refer to them as being, ‘The registered persons’.

At our last inspection on 4 October 2016 we found that there was a breach of the regulations that had reduced the registered persons' ability to consistently provide people with care that was being well-led. We also said that other improvements needed to be made to ensure that the service was safe, caring and responsive. We rated each of these parts of the service as ‘requires improvement’. Overall, our assessment of the service was ‘requires improvement’.

Shortly after our inspection visit the registered persons told us that they had made the improvements that were necessary to address each of our concerns. The registered persons also provided us with subsequent monthly updates about how they were addressing and making further improvements to the concerns we had raised at our last inspection. In addition they said they had reviewed the arrangements in place for the way the home environment was set out and that they had changed the name of the home from Eccleshare Court 1-39 to Eccleshare Court. They said these changes were made to help more clearly distinguish the home from another home the registered persons owned which was located next to Eccleshare Court.

At the present inspection we found that suitable arrangements had been introduced to ensure that the service was well managed. The breach of the regulations for well-led had been addressed and resolved and as a result people were receiving safe, caring and responsive care which was well-led. Given the progress made we revised our assessment of each of these aspects of the service to ‘good’ and also changed the overall assessment of the service to ‘good’.