Gormanach House

We found the following examples of good practice Extensive effort had been made to prioritise people's mental health and wellbeing. Some of the people living in the home did not understand the pandemic or the risks posed by COVID-19. Staff worked with people and completed risk assessments to enable people to visit relatives at their family homes to ensure people's mental wellbeing remained positive.

A booking in procedure had been introduced for all visitors who came to the home. This included health questionnaires, temperature checks and lateral flow tests (LFT). The visitors would then wait for the results from the LFT tests in a designated area at the front of the house before proceeding with their visit.

With some people's lack of capacity to understand the risks of COVID-19, furniture had been moved to facilitate social distancing. During the inspection people were seen to sit a large distance away from each other, we were told by the manager that this is normal behaviour due to the nature of people's disabilities, social distancing has not been an issue.

Appropriate changes had been introduced to the home. This enabled staff to keep people safe and encourage social distancing in communal areas. There was a sign in the kitchen area to remind people of a limited amount of people in the area at any one time.

Staff were supported with training throughout the pandemic to ensure they were confident with following best practise. Staff were also supported with regular COVID-19 updates from the head office. This included all relevant changes in guidance when they happened so staff were confident they were complying with all up to date guidance.

The provider had maintained a plentiful supply of PPE throughout the pandemic and the manager was using the government portal to ensure the PPE stock remained at a safe level. The manager told us that they were confident that if the PPE stock were ever low then the provider would support them.

Thorough cleaning schedules had been implemented in response to the pandemic. This included regular cleaning of high touch areas such as banisters and light switches. Evidence was seen of these high risk areas being sanitised regularly throughout the day.

The provider was taking part in the regular testing programme and ensured all staff and people living in the home had access to regular testing. This followed guidance and ensured appropriate steps were taken in recording tests in a timely way. Risk assessments had been completed for people living in the home that did

not have the capacity and staff were unable to complete testing on. Further daily checks had been introduced to monitor for symptoms which included twice daily temperature checks of all people living in the home.

Further information is in the findings below.

The five questions we ask about services and what we found