Eastbourne care agency found to have breaches in several areas

Bluebird Care, in Commercial Road, is a domiciliary care agency that provides personal care to people living in their own houses and flats. According to the report people using the service have a range of needs including dementia, physical disabilities, or are elderly. It was inspected by the CQC at the end of last year and the report was released last month (February 2023).

The CQC rates services on five categories - safe, effective, caring, responsive, and well-led. On everything other than well-led the site scored requires improvement. For well-led it was inadequate. This resulted in an overall rating of requires improvement.

The previous inspection was in May 2018 and it got a good rating. This new inspection was prompted ‘in part due to information [the CQC] has received about the service’ the report says.

The report said: “Safeguarding concerns had not been reported to the local authority to help protect people from harm or abuse. Staff knew how to look out for signs of abuse however, training had not been completed in some time and not all staff knew where to report concerns.

“Risks to people were not well managed. Risk assessments were out of date and assessment tools were not appropriately used to help assess and monitor risk.

“Medicines were not managed safely. Gaps were found in people’s electronic medicine administration records. Where medicines were discontinued by the GP records were not updated. People’s care plans were not kept up to date when changes had been made to their care calls. This left people at risk of not receiving their medicines as prescribed.”

On the subject of staff, it says people were recruited safely but there was a ‘high level’ of agency staff being used which got ‘mixed feedback’. The report said: “We were also concerned about how agency staff were monitored and where incidents had occurred, lessons had not been learnt. Staff had not received up to date training and not all supervisions had been carried out.”

Despite people having their needs assessed before receiving care, the report said care plans weren’t ‘regularly reviewed’ and in some cases wound care plans weren’t in place.

The report said: “Guidance for staff was not clear as to what support people required. Positive behaviour support plans were not in place for people where incidents had occurred. Staff were not given the tools to help support people in a positive way.

“People were not supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives and staff did not support them in the least restrictive way possible and in their best interests; the policies and systems in the service did not support this practice.”

There were also concerns raised about quality assurance processes and audits. However, the report did say the provider has recently changed and is more visible in the service compared to the previous provider. Staff were also praised for being ‘kind and caring’.

The report finished: “We have identified breaches in relation to person-centred care, consent, safe care and treatment, safeguarding and good governance at this inspection. We will request an action plan from the provider to understand what they will do to improve the standards of quality and safety.”

A spokesperson for the service said: “Under the direction of our new and experienced ownership team, we are currently part way through an extensive transformation programme across our service to ensure that we are consistently providing the best possible service for our valued customers.

“Though the CQC’s most recent feedback was disappointing, we are therefore confident that with more time we will be able to demonstrate that we have fully embedded the changes we are making to inherited processes and policies.

“Since the inspectors visited our service last year, we have welcomed several new members of our team who will help us to ensure that the new record keeping, auditing, and reporting processes we have introduced are fully embedded. We have also carried out enhanced refresher training for our whole team to support them to sustain the changes we are making for the long term.

“We were pleased to see that our customers spoke so positively of our hard-working Care Assistants in their feedback quoted throughout the report. With the support of our Local Authority partners, we are all absolutely committed to doing what it takes to ensure that the next time the CQC’s inspection team visit us we are able to demonstrate our high standards of care and effective processes.”

You can view the full report here