Kinder Home Care Services

About the service

Kinder Home Care Services is a domiciliary care service. They provide personal care to people living in their own homes or individual flats. The service provides support to people with a learning disability and autistic people within a supported living setting.

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 the inspection 44 people including children were receiving personal care.

People’s experience of using this service and what we found

Right Support: Staff communicated with people in ways that met their needs and supported them to make decisions following best practice guidance. Policies and systems in the service supported this practice. Risks to people were assessed and managed. People’s care plans were comprehensive and personalised with their range of needs, abilities and goals. Staff empowered people to pursue hobbies and activities of interest to them.

There were enough staff to meet people’s needs and keep them safe. People received care and support from staff who knew them well and understood their individual needs and preferences. People were supported with their medicines and their dietary needs by staff trained and competent to do so.

Right Care: People received kind and compassionate care. Staff protected and respected people’s privacy and dignity. Staff provided personalised care and support to promote people’s wellbeing, enhance their quality of life and to achieve positive outcomes. Staff were trained and understood how to protect people from poor care and abuse. The service worked well with other agencies to do so. Staff promoted equality and diversity in their support for people. They understood people’s cultural needs and respected their diverse needs and requirements. People’s communication needs were identified, and care plans detailed their preferred ways to communicate and make decisions.

Right Culture: Staff were safely recruited and provided consistently and continuity in care. Staff received an induction and training which included areas of care and support, infection prevention and control, and person-specific training. Action was taken to ensure systems to monitor staff training was kept up to date was strengthened.

Quality systems were in place to monitor the quality of service to enable the provider to improve the service and the lives of people supported. Risks to people were managed effectively and safely and people and their relatives were involved in planning their care. The registered manager was responsive to feedback and introduced a system to ensure people’s care needs were reviewed regularly, involving the person and their families, advocates or other professionals as appropriate.

The registered manager understood their role and responsibilities. Staff placed people’s wishes, needs and rights at the heart of everything they did. Feedback received from people, relatives, staff and professionals about the quality of care and the management was consistently positive.

People and their relatives told us they felt confident to approach the management team and that their feedback or complaint would be listened and responded to. The management team had a shared commitment to the culture and values of the service, where people remained at the centre of their care and support.

The management and staff worked with external agencies and health and social care professionals. Local authority commissioners reported the provider was responsive to feedback and was working with them to make the required improvements and recommendations.

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

Rating at last inspection and update

The last rating for this service was good at the last inspection (published 10 October 2018). The rating remains good.

Why we inspected

This inspection was prompted by a review of the information we held about this service and prompted in part due to concerns received about the quality of care and risks to people.

We found no evidence during this inspection that people were at risk of harm from this concern. Please see the safe sections of this full report.

The overall rating for the service has remained good based on the findings of this inspection.

You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Kinder Home Care Services on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Follow up

We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.

Kinder Home Care Services provides a domiciliary care support service to people living within their own homes in the community in Kettering and surrounding villages. There were 17 people receiving support when we inspected.

A registered manager was in post. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to manage the service. Like registered providers, 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.

People received care from staff that had received the right training and support to do the job. People benefitted from a service that was appropriately managed so that they received their service in a timely and reliable way. They received care from staff that were friendly, compassionate, kind and caring.

Staff recruitment procedures ensured that appropriate pre-employment checks were completed to ensure only suitable staff worked at the service. There were sufficient numbers of staff to provide people with the support that had been agreed with them.

People’s needs had been assessed prior their service being agreed. There were plans of care in place that been developed to guide staff in providing care in partnership with people who used the service. Their care records contained risk assessments and risk management plans to mitigate the risks to people. These plans provided staff with guidance and information they needed on how to minimise the identified risks. There were procedures in place to guide staff when supporting people to take their medicines.

Staff were trained in infection control, and supplied with appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE), such as disposable gloves and aprons, to perform their roles safely.

Staff were responsive to people’s changing needs. Staff could demonstrate that they understood what was required of them to provide people with the care they needed to remain living independently in their local community.

People were happy with the way that staff provided their care and support. They said were listened to, their views were acknowledged and acted upon and their care and support was delivered in accordance with their assessed needs and their preferences for how they wished to receive their care.

People's consent was sought before any care was provided and the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 were met. People were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff supported them in the least restrictive way possible; the policies and systems in place at the service supported this practice.

Staff had a good understanding of what safeguarding meant and the procedures for reporting abuse. The staff we spoke with were confident that any concerns they raised would be followed up appropriately by the registered manager or other senior staff.

People were cared for by staff that had access to the support, supervision, and training they needed to work effectively in their roles. There was good leadership regarding day-to-day and longer-term management of the service.

There was an effective system of quality assurance in place which ensured people consistently received a good standard of care and support. Arrangements were in place for the service to reflect and learn from complaints and incidents to improve safety across the service.

The provider worked in partnership with other agencies and commissioners to ensure that where improvements were needed action was taken. Communication was open and honest, and any improvements identified were worked upon as required.