Archived: Emergency Personnel Homecare Ltd

Emergency Personnel Homecare Ltd is a domiciliary care agency. It provides nursing and personal care to people living in their own homes. It provides a service to older adults, younger disabled adults and children. 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 the provider was supporting 49 people with personal care across 16 London Boroughs and 10 other Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) outside of London.

The provider also recruited staff through a recruitment agency which was part of their organisation. They provide nursing and healthcare staff to NHS hospitals and private healthcare services under separate contracts, not managed within the remit of the CQC’s regulatory authority.

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

We received information raising concerns about the current recruitment practices of the provider, which alleged nursing and healthcare staff were sent out to work before the necessary checks had been completed. This included staff not having Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificates, appropriate visas or right to work in the UK documents or valid references. It was also alleged that documents were falsified to show they were compliant for their external auditors and senior staff asked the recruitment team to amend dates on a range of documents to show they were currently valid.

We found no evidence during the inspection that showed safe recruitment practices were not being followed, with examples of the provider following best practice to ensure the staff they recruited were suitable to work with vulnerable people and children.

The management team were open and transparent when we discussed the concerns with them and explained they had gone through a large change in the team structure, where there had been a turnover of staff due to performance issues.

We did not speak with any people who used the service as part of this inspection as they would not be able to comment on the recruitment practices carried out by the provider.

Rating at last inspection

The last rating for this service was good (published 11 December 2018).

Why we inspected

We undertook this targeted inspection to follow up on a specific concern which we had received about the service. The inspection was prompted in response to concerns received about safe recruitment practices. A decision was made for us to inspect and examine those risks.

CQC have introduced targeted inspections to follow up on Warning Notices or to check specific concerns. They do not look at an entire key question, only the part of the key question we are specifically concerned about. Targeted inspections do not change the rating from the previous inspection. This is because they do not assess all areas of a key question.

We found no evidence during this inspection that people were at risk of harm from these concerns.

Please see the safe section of this full report.

You can read the report from our last inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Emergency Personnel Homecare Ltd on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Follow up

We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service. If we receive any concerning information we may return to inspect.