Alice House

At our assessment 20 September 2024 to 7 October 2024, we rated the service inadequate overall and in the key questions safe and well led. There were 7 breaches of the legal regulations in relation to safe care and treatment, staffing, recruitment, medicines optimisation and good governance. We served 2 warning notices in relation to safeguarding and good governance. The service was placed into special measures. The purpose of special measures is to ensure that services providing inadequate care make significant improvements. Special measures provide a framework within which we use our enforcement powers in response to inadequate care and provide a timeframe within which providers must improve the quality of the care they provide. We conducted an assessment 25 March to 7 April 2025 to follow up on the 2 warning notices, to check improvements had been made. We found at that assessment, the warning notices had been met, and improvements had been made. We did not follow up on the other breaches of regulation identified at the last assessment. The scores for the quality statements we did not assess, remained unchanged, as further work was needed to develop and embed new governance processes.

At this assessment we looked at all 33 quality statements and provided the service with a new overall rating. We found improvements had been made, with governance systems embedded and the overall provider oversight significantly improved. The provider was no longer in breach of regulations with all 7 breaches met. The service is no longer in special measures. For the past year, the provider had worked closely with a care consultancy and the local authority to implement new governance systems. The operations director informed us they were parting ways with the consultancy company now that improvements had been made and sustained. The registered manager continued to be in post; however, they had resigned and were due to leave. Plans were in place to recruit a new registered manager with cover arrangements in place.

The provider and registered manager had good oversight of the service and continued to conduct audits, with continued improvements made to the governance systems. Lessons had been learnt relating to the previous failures. The staff team spoke positively of the changes made, along with professional feedback being positive. The service had a service improvement plan in place and continued to identify any shortfalls, with actions put into place to address this.

The atmosphere in the home was much calmer with the staff team feeling supported. At the time of are assessment 23 people were living at the home.