Archived: Solsken Limited

Solsken Limited is operated by Solsken Limited.

The service provides care to individuals with complex care needs in their own homes. At the time of our inspection the service provided care to five patients. Solsken Limited are commissioned by three clinical commissioning groups, one in the South East and two in the Yorkshire and Humber region, to provide care under the NHS continuing healthcare budget.

We carried out a focused unannounced inspection on 17 May 2019 in response to concerns received by the Care Quality Commission about staff competencies and training, which highlighted potential risks to patient safety. Our inspection focused on regulation 12: safe care and treatment and regulation 17: good governance.

A focused inspection differs to a comprehensive inspection, as it is more targeted and looks at specific concerns rather than gathering a holistic view across a service or provider.

In our comprehensive inspections, to get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well led?

Focused inspections do not usually look at all five key questions; they focus on the areas indicated by the information that triggers the focused inspection. Although they are smaller in scale, focused inspections broadly follow the same process as a comprehensive inspection.

We inspected but did not rate the safe, effective, responsive and well-led domains. We did not inspect caring. The focus of our inspection related to mandatory training, safeguarding, cleanliness, infection prevention and control, assessing and responding to patient risk, staffing , records, incident reporting, competent staff, learning from complaints, and governance, risk management and quality measurement.

We visited the head office and spoke with the registered manager, a director, the operations manager and the clinical lead. We reviewed staff files, training records and various documents relating to the overall management of the service. Following the inspection we spoke with three members of staff via telephone.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• The service provided mandatory training in key skills.

• Risks assessments were completed for each patient.

• Staff were recruited to work with specific packages of care and completed competencies on the basis of patient need.

• There were sufficient staff to provide cover.

• Staff received supervsision every three months.

• Patient’s received information on how to make a complaint.

• Appropriate recruitment procedures were in place.

• Possible risks to the service were identified in a business contingency and emergency planning policy.

We also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• It was not clear from audits of log sheets that issues that had been identified and actions needed addressed.

• It was unclear what level of safeguarding training staff were completing.

• The service did not hold a formal risk register.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Ann Ford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North)