Woodhall House

People's experience of the service and what we found:

We expect health and social care providers to guarantee people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices and independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. 'Right support, right care, right culture' is the guidance CQC follows to make assessment and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it. Children 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

CQC do not rate services that are defined as being a children's home and which are also registered with Ofsted.

We conducted the assessment on 29th April in response to receiving anonymous concerns about the provider. The anonymous concerns focussed on leadership, prescribing of medication and staff competency. A decision was made for us to assess and examine those risks. We completed a targeted assessment to examine those risks and looked at parts of the key questions; Safe, Effective and Well Led. We focused our assessment on leaders’ response to incidents following nine notifications of incidents to CQC over a twelve-month period.

We found medicines were stored safely within the home. Medicines were administered in a way that respected young people's preferences. Multi-disciplinary team working was well established within the home and there was oversight of prescribing. We saw that staff had completed training appropriate to the needs of the children and had also completed bespoke training if required for a particular child’s need. We found a transparent and open culture at Woodhall House with the opportunity for staff to voice any concerns or highlight areas for improvement.

The previous inspection report dated 05 April 2024 highlighted recommendations for medicines optimisation, incident reporting, the medicines policy and multi-agency working including working in partnership with families and carers. At this inspection we found that the provider had acted on these recommendations. You can read the report from our last inspection on our website at www.cqc.org.uk. At this assessment we found no breaches in regulations but have made the following recommendations:

- Infection prevention and control processes prior to medicines administration needs to be strengthened to prevent and manage the risk of infection.

- Transition planning for a child’s next setting needs to be identified, discussed and recorded clearly in the records throughout the child’s placement.