Falcon Care Agency Ltd

Falcon Care Agency Ltd is a domiciliary care agency providing personal care. The service provides support to youngers adults with dementia, physical disabilities and long-term mental health conditions. At the time of our inspection there were 28 people using the service. The registered manager advised inspectors that all these people received personal care.

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

Service users were not protected from abuse and improper treatment. One person was found to be restrained by staff without legal authority, or consent from the person. Risks to people using the service were not assessed or mitigated. Medicines were not managed safely. Staff were not recruited safely.

Staff did not have the training and skills to support the people they worked with. There was a lack of training delivered to staff. Staff did not receive regular competency assessments or supervision meetings with the registered manager. Care plans were not always in place for people.

Where people were deemed to lack capacity, formal assessments had not been carried out to assess whether they needed support with decision making. This meant staff had no guidance in place, and risked staff restricting people by making unnecessary decisions on their behalf.

The service was not caring. As a result of our inspection, 9 referrals were made to the Local Authority to safeguard people from harm and abuse. There were widespread concerns found during the inspection, and these did not demonstrate that caring and respectful care was provided at all times to people.

People's care was not personalised. People were not always supported with their communication needs which meant the provider could not be assured that people were always heard or understood by staff. The service did not always support people appropriately in the pursuit of their own activities, and hobbies.

The service was not well-led. There were widespread shortfalls in the day to day running of the service, leading to multiple breaches of regulation.

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee autistic people and people with a learning disability the choices, dignity, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. Right support, right care, right culture is the statutory guidance which supports CQC to make assessments and judgements about services providing support to people with a learning disability and/or autistic people. We considered this guidance as there were people using the service who have a learning disability and or who are autistic.

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 this service was good (published 8 December 2021).

Why we inspected

The inspection was prompted in part due to concerns received about safeguarding, training, medicines, and quality of care. A decision was made for us to inspect and examine those risks.

The overall rating for the service has changed from good to inadequate based on the findings of this inspection.

You can see what action we have asked the provider to take at the end of this full report.

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

Enforcement

We have identified breaches in relation to person centred care, consent, staffing, recruitment, safety, protecting people from abuse, and good governance at this inspection.

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

Full information about CQC’s regulatory response to the more serious concerns found during inspections is added to reports after any representations and appeals have been concluded.

Follow up

The overall rating for this service is ‘Inadequate’ and the service is therefore in ‘special measures’. This means we will keep the service under review and, if we do not propose to cancel the provider’s registration, we will re-inspect within 6 months to check for significant improvements.

If the provider has not made enough improvement within this timeframe and there is still a rating of inadequate for any key question or overall rating, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures. This will mean we will begin the process of preventing the provider from operating this service. This will usually lead to cancellation of their registration or to varying the conditions the registration.

For adult social care services, the maximum time for being in special measures will usually be no more than 12 months. If the service has demonstrated improvements when we inspect it, and it is no longer rated as inadequate for any of the five key questions it will no longer be in special measures.

Falcon Care Agency Ltd is a domiciliary care agency, providing personal care to people in their own homes. At the time of inspection, no one was receiving 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.

People's experience of using this service and what we found.

There was a system to include information of how to reduce risks to people's safety in people's care plans.

Quality assurance systems had been put into place to measure whether people were provided with a quality service.

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 inadequate. (Report published June 2023).

The provider completed an action plan after the last inspection to show what they would do and by when to improve.

As this inspection was a targeted inspection we did not review in full the breaches in regulation. We will review full information about the breaches at our next inspection.

This service has been in Special Measures since March 2023. During this inspection the provider demonstrated that improvements have been made.

Why we inspected.

The overall rating for the service has not changed following this targeted inspection and remains inadequate. We use targeted inspections to follow up on the Suspension of a service or to check concerns. They do not look at an entire key questions, only the part of the key questions 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.

For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating.

Please see the safe and well led sections of this report.

You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for Falcon Care Agency Ltd on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

Follow up

The overall rating for this service is ‘Inadequate’ and the service is therefore in ‘special measures’. This means we will keep the service under review and, if we do not propose to cancel the provider’s registration, we will re-inspect within 6 months to check for significant improvements.

If the provider has not made enough improvement within this timeframe and there is still a rating of inadequate for any key question or overall rating, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures. This will mean we will begin the process of preventing the provider from operating this service. This will usually lead to cancellation of their registration or to varying the conditions the registration.

For adult social care services, the maximum time for being in special measures will usually be no more than 12 months. If the service has demonstrated improvements when we inspect it, and it is no longer rated as inadequate for any of the five key questions it will no longer be in special measures.

Falcon Care Agency Ltd is a small domiciliary care service providing support and personal care to people in their own homes. The service is registered to provide care to people living with dementia, mental health conditions, sensory impairments and younger adults as well as those with a physical disability.

Not everyone who uses 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. The service was providing support to 9 people with personal care needs at the time of our inspection.

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

People and their relatives told us the service enabled them to feel safe and staff were reliable. Relatives said any concerns were immediately addressed. People liked having a known group of staff to look after them.

Professionals told us staff were proactive and worked positively with other agencies to promote and maximise people’s outcomes. They had achieved positive outcomes where this had not been thought possible.

People told us care was always delivered in a person-centred way. Care was tailored to the needs of the person and updated when required with relative involvement, so everyone knew what was happening.

People, relatives, staff and professionals were all very positive about the engagement the manager had with everyone. Communication with the registered manager was described as “great” by relatives and staff.

Staff told us they had enough time to travel in between visits and they felt they could discuss with the manager if they needed further time. Staff had received relevant training in relation to their role and told us they were offered opportunities for further training

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.

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

Why we inspected

This service was registered with us on 03 January 2020 and this is the first inspection.

This was a planned comprehensive inspection prompted by our data insight which assesses potential risks at services, concerns in relation to aspects of care provision and as the service had not been inspected since registering with CQC.

Follow up

We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service until we return to visit as per our re-inspection programme. If we receive any concerning information we may inspect sooner.