Exceptional Care Services

Exceptional Care Services also offers other services including supporting aspects of the special educational needs of children and young people which CQC does not regulate. The provider of the service is also the Nominated Individual (NI), the registered manager and undertakes care calls to people. Throughout this report we refer to them as the manager. A NI is a person who supervises the management of the regulated activities of a service.

At the time of our inspection Exceptional Care Services were not registered to provide a specialist service for people with a learning disability or autistic people. The manager told us that in November 2025, they had applied to have a Condition on their registration; “not to provide a service to people with a learning disability or autistic people” removed, but CQC had declined this due to a lack of supporting evidence of a specialist service provided by the manager.

One person was being supported by the service and had a learning disability. Whilst we accepted this was not the person’s primary need, the manager needed to have regard to the principles of Right Support, Right Care, Right Culture. We assessed the service against this and found some improvements were needed by the manager to guarantee people with a learning disability respect, equality, choices, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted. Following our inspection feedback, the manager told us they would continue to work towards meeting the requirements of a specialist service and re-submitted their application to CQC to have the Condition removed.

We gave the manager short notice of our inspection on the morning of 17 April 2026 and shared a deadline with them for records and policies to be received by us by mid-morning on 21 April 2026. During our inspection the manager told us they had purchased a new IT system during 2025 and were still learning about the functions within the system and where to locate documents. This meant we did not receive all the information we asked for, before the deadline. This was extended to enable to manager to share important information with us which we received on 23 April 2026. We informed the manager anything received after this date would not be included in their inspection evidence.

This is the first assessment for this service which registered with us in February 2025. We found 1 breach of regulation related to the governance of the service.

The manager’s new IT system had functions in place to enable them to undertake checks and audits on the safety and quality of the service, but the systems and processes had not been developed or used, in practice, to monitor and improve the safety and quality of the service. The manager told us this was because they were such a small service and they completed checks informally. However, these were not always effective as we found shortfalls, such as some important records not being in place, which had not been identified by their informal checks.

Staff had been recruited safely and told us they had received most of the training they needed. However, some training, such as understanding the needs of people with a learning disability, had not been completed. Following our feedback, a staff member completed further training.

Medication administration records were not in place for staff to use when needed.

Staff understood how to protect people from the risks of abuse.

Some risk management plans were detailed and gave staff the information they needed. But some risks had not been assessed, and risk management plans were not in place. The manager took immediate action to put further risk management in place following our feedback.

Despite the concerns we identified, we received positive feedback from a relative and staff.

We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns we found at this inspection.