Lifeways Community Care (Swindon)

Lifeways Community Care (Swindon) is part of a national organisation which provides care to people with learning disabilities living in different communities. 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 assessments and judgements about services supporting people with a learning disability and autistic people and providers must have regard to it. We found the model of care was not always in line with current best practice guidance right support, right care, and right culture.

Some staff still raised concerns about day-to-day support for new members of staff and told us this affected the planning for people accessing activities they enjoyed. We found the service was not following best practice guidelines in relation to storing medicines in supported living accommodation. Although the service had increased management support available since our last assessment, this was not yet fully embedded. The provider was taking steps to address this through training and development opportunities for new managers. However, people were now being appropriately safeguarded, and there were enough staff to support people. The service had introduced new initiatives since the last assessment, such as adapting the digital system to ensure prompts were available to investigate safeguarding incidents and manage audits.