Lifeways Community Care (New Barnet)

Lifeways Community Care (New Barnet) provides personal care for people living in their own homes. In supported living people’s care and housing are provided under separate contractual agreements. The service provides support to those with learning disabilities and autistic people for up to 31 adults. Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks relating to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. At the time of our visit the service was providing a regulated activity to 30 people. Many people had complex care needs and needed 24-hour support, often with more than one carer.

We assessed the service against ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgements about whether the provider guaranteed people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices, independence and good access to local communities most people take for granted.

As we visited 8 of the provider’s supported living services (SLS). We identified some inconsistencies in the provision of care between them. This included the quality-of-care people were receiving and the effectiveness of the provider’s oversight systems and leadership.

During the assessment 2 of the 8 SLS’ were in the process of being transferred to new providers. One of these had been the decision of the local authority and for 1 location the provider had made the decision to serve notice. The provider, commissioners and other professionals fed back the challenges of providing the level of care required, to ensure people using the service received consistently good quality and safe care.

Overall, while signs of progress were evident, the provider had not yet established the level of governance needed to ensure ongoing compliance, timely identification of emerging risks, or a consistently safe standard of care. Embedding a positive culture and an effective management structure will require continued oversight, clearer accountability, and more rigorous quality assurance processes.

Information to support the care people needed, including the administration of medicines, was inconsistent and showed conflicting and/or out of date information. This included hospital passports and health action plans relating to medicines which were important to ensure consistent safe care between services.

The provider had introduced a new electronic care planning system, and progress had been made to ensure all support plans were being transferred onto the platform. However, further work was required to ensure staff consistently reviewed and updated this information so that support plans remained accurate, current, and reflective of people’s needs.

During the inspection, we identified examples where staff had recorded inaccurate or inconsistent information in daily care notes. These errors had not been identified or addressed through routine oversight by senior staff, indicating that the governance arrangements in place were not sufficiently robust to ensure the quality and reliability of the information recorded. This lack of effective monitoring meant that inaccurate records could remain uncorrected, increasing the risk of staff delivering care based on outdated or incorrect guidance. The provider continued to have paper records available alongside digital information which increased the amount of information staff needed to review, this remained necessary as agency staff were still unable to access electronic records. The provider told us they were in the last stages of testing for this, and this would be available soon.

Staff told us they were now receiving supervision and appraisal and support day to day, from senior staff had improved.

We identified continued breaches of regulation in relation to safe and effective treatment and good governance. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns we found during this assessment.

This service has been in Special Measures since 12 September 2025. The provider demonstrated some improvements have been made. The service is no longer rated as inadequate overall or in any of the key questions. Therefore, this service is no longer in Special Measures.