- Homecare service
Total Care Norfolk
Report from 16 January 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment 22 January 2024 to 26 March 2024. Total Care Norfolk is a domiciliary care service providing personal home care to people, including those who are living with dementia. We carried out this assessment following the receipt of information relating to staffing concerns at the service. The assessment was carried out remotely with telephone calls to people who used the service and staff during March 2024. The service, which supported 62 people at the time of our assessment, was rated good at our last inspection on 29 May 2021, which was carried out under our previous methodology. The overall rating for this service has now deteriorated to Requires Improvement. Although people’s experience of using the service was broadly positive, we have identified breaches of regulation relating to the recruitment and training of staff and overall governance. These poor practices placed people at risk of unsafe care and treatment. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 8 people who used the service and 1 relative about the care and support provided. We also viewed the latest quality surveys the provider had sent out to people who used the service, although these were not recent. Feedback to us was positive about the reliability of the staff and their skills and kindness. One relative felt staff had gone the extra mile when they had been unwell which limited their ability to care for their family member. They told us, “They [the staff] were really helpful.” Some people told us they struggled with the standard of spoken English on the part of some staff. The provider had not identified this as a concern or a risk. Some negative feedback in the surveys had not always been addressed by the provider and some people were unhappy they never knew which staff would be coming to them. While the majority of the people we spoke with expressed that they were happy with their care, our assessment found elements of care did not meet the expected standards.