Atlas Care Services Ltd Lincolnshire

On this page

• Overview
• Learning culture
• Safe systems, pathways and transitions
• Safeguarding
• Involving people to manage risks
• Safe environments
• Safe and effective staffing
• Infection prevention and control
• Medicines optimisation

Safe – this means we looked for evidence that people were protected from abuse and avoidable harm. This is the first assessment for this newly registered service. This key question has been rated Good. This meant people were safe and protected from avoidable harm.

However, some individual risk assessments lacked robust information on how potential risks to people’s safety should be managed. The timings of some people’s care calls were not consistent. However, people were safeguarded from the risk of harm, there was enough adequately trained staff to provide support for people and their medicines were well managed.

This service scored 69 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The senior management team worked closely with staff to ensure learning from events at the service. We saw evidence of investigations into incidents and accidents and how any learning from these investigations were shared with staff. There were regular staff meetings and debriefings following any events. One staff member said, “They (management team) are good, there is a group on What's app that they put information on and they are open, you can come to them with anything.”

The senior management team worked to ensure people were transitioned into their care packages safely when they were referred to them. The operational manager told us although they had a non-refusal contract with the local authority they would not except people referred to them unless they were able to provide safe care. They said, “We have to be sure we have the resources to provide care for those people.” They went on to say they continually worked to match the resources to the need of people they supported. The staff at the service also worked with relatives and health professionals to make sure when people needed to access different services or increased support they were able to access this. We saw an example of how people were supported when we visited a person who had a fall on the morning of our visit. The person had been visited by the falls team following their fall, who had suggested the person needed more support as their mobility was decreasing. The care staff discussed how they would feed this back to the managers at Atlas so the person’s care could be reviewed with the social services team, to ensure their care met their needs.

People and their families told us they had confidence in the staff who supported people, no one reported any concerns about their safety when receiving care from staff. One relative told us their elderly mother received personal care from male carers and they were very respectful when providing care.

Staff we spoke with were aware of their responsibilities in protecting people from potential abuse. They received regular training on safeguarding adults and all the staff we spoke with told us they were confident the registered manager would follow up any concerns they shared with them. We saw evidence the registered manager reported any safeguarding concerns to ourselves, the local authority, and undertook thorough investigations into any safeguarding allegations.

The majority of care plans we viewed contained robust risk assessments to support people and staff to reduce risks which may impact on people’s safety. However, some care plans required further details on how potential risks to people’s safety should be managed. For example, the care plan for one person did not fully explore the potential risks related to the person’s memory loss, mobility issues, and risk of falls. There were some measures in place to reduce this risk, but further measures needed to be considered to support the person safely. We raised this with the registered manager. They undertook a reassessment of the care plans to ensure all risks had been reviewed and where necessary measures were in place to mitigate the potential risks.

Other care plans showed people and their relatives had been involved in creating the care package and had good information to support staff provide appropriate care for people. The operational manager for the service told us they continually worked with staff to support them to undertake robust assessments of people’s needs.

Throughout the assessment we saw evidence the provider had worked with people to ensure the environments they lived in were safe. The provider also worked with the National rehabilitation service. This service looks at a range of support allowing people to remain in their own homes following any changes to their needs, this includes any changes to their environment or specialist equipment people may need.

There was mixed feedback from people and their relatives regarding the care call timings and staff not coming at agreed times. One relative said, “I have issues, we put in a plan to come, but they never adhere to it.” A further person said, “There have been times when it has been changed 2 or 3 times in a day, and there has been no communication.” However, we also had some positive feedback from people who told us staff mainly came within the agreed time frames. We reviewed the service’s call logs and found over a period of a month 81% of calls were delivered on time (or within 15 mins), 19% more than 15 minutes late and of these 4% more than 45 minutes late.

We also received positive feedback on how people were supported by a regular group of staff and how they appreciated having staff who knew them coming into their homes. The service did have some agency staff working for them, but they worked to have a regular group of agency staff to reduce the numbers of staff going into people’s homes. The registered manager told us they strived to ensure people got regular care staff to support them, but acknowledged it wasn’t always possible. When new people were referred to the service it sometimes took a few weeks to ensure the package of care was suitable for a person and manage workloads so people were receiving care from a regular group of staff.

Staff recruitment files and agency staff profiles showed robust recruitment processes were in place. The disclosure and Barring System (DBS) was used to check if potential staff had any criminal convictions, so the provider could make safer employment decisions when recruiting staff. References were in place and employment history was checked prior to employment.

The feedback from people and relatives was that staff were using personal protective equipment (PPE) when they undertook visits to people’s homes. Staff we spoke with showed a good knowledge of how they could prevent the spread of infection through their day to day work practices. We saw staff had been provided with regular infection prevention and control (IPC) training and had access to sufficient PPE to support them in their roles.

Where needed people were supported with administration of medicines. Some people just needed staff to prompt them, other people needed full support with staff managing the security, ordering and administration of their medicines. We saw there was appropriate guidance on people’s task lists for staff so people received the right level of support.

Staff were provided with training in safe handling of medicines and had regular spot checks on their competency by their line managers. One of the field worker supervisors told us she undertook assessments for staff administering medicines. Part of their role during a spot check was to check medicines against what should be there on the medicine’s administration record (MAR) watch how staff administered and recorded medicines given. We saw there were regular medicines audits in place and any medicines errors had been recorded, investigated and information shared with staff for future learning.