Bluebird Care (Calderdale & Bradford South)

Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided.

People liked their care workers and said the quality of care was generally good. They received good support with their personal care, taking their medicines and with their meals. People and their relatives told us staff were kind and caring and did a good job.

Some relatives told us they were not happy with the communication from the service. They said it was at times hard to get through to the office on the telephone. The management team explained this was because office-based staff were having to go out to cover staff who were off sick so were not available to respond to phone calls.

The provider's systems for monitoring that care calls were taking place were not always effective. The monitoring system produced alerts for office- based staff when a care worker had not arrived at a customer's house to provide their care. However some alerts were missed due to the responsible person being out providing care and this had a negative impact on a few people who told us they had missed a meal and/or were upset by the missed call.

For several months the service had not been carrying out assessment visits to people before they started providing their care. This meant there were no environmental risk assessments for some people and other people had assessments and care plans which had not been updated for some time. The service relied on care workers to tell office based staff the risks they observed in a customer's home. The provider told us that this was improving at the time of the inspection.

Staff were happy working for this service. They said the registered manager and nominated individual (the person who represents the company) were responsive and helpful. The training was of a good standard but

the service was not up to date with the monitoring of care workers to ensure they were doing a good job.

The service had a comprehensive action plan in place to improve standards and the registered manager and nominated individual were very committed to improvement.