- Homecare service
Classique Care Services Limited
Report from 27 January 2025 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
This service is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care for 125 older people living with a range of health care needs. Some people required support with memory loss and dementia, whilst others were reliant on care staff to assist them with their personal care and health needs. Not everyone who used the service received personal care. In this service, the Care Quality Commission [CQC] can only inspect the service received by people who get support with personal care.
At the time of this inspection the local authority, London Borough of Croydon, commissioned 138 packages of care for people and 125 people received personal care. As part of the commissioning process a quality review was carried out in December 2024 and concerns were raised that indicated the provider did not always work well with people and healthcare partners to establish and maintain safe systems of care. They did not always manage or monitor people’s safety appropriately.
This assessment was undertaken following CQC’s new approach for assessment. This was our first assessment of the service using this new approach. We looked at all the key question areas (safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led). We carried out an announced visit to the service on 4 February 2025 and follow up visits on 10th, 14th and 28th February. The assessment was carried out by two inspectors and an Expert by Experience. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.
We visited the offices of this service and spoke with 4 members of care staff, the nominated individual, the finance director, the manager and a consultant. We reviewed a range of records. This included 6 people's care records, medicines records and 6 staff files as well as other records relating to how the service was managed. We spoke with 7 people who used the service and 4 relatives of people. The service had not had a manager registered with the CQC since 31 July 2023.
At the last inspection in February 2023, we rated this service ‘Good’ in safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. We carried out this inspection because we received concerns from the local authority. Following this comprehensive assessment, the service has received an overall rating of ‘Inadequate’.
We found 5 breaches of regulations relating to safe and effective staffing, medicines, risk management, complaints and governance. The governance systems in place had failed to identify and rectify the widespread and significant concerns found at this assessment.
People were not receiving consistently person-centred care that met their needs. This was because there were not enough suitably trained and skilled staff to provide continuity of care. People did not always know which staff member would be providing their care. The risks to people had not been consistently identified and/or mitigated and people had not always received their medicines safely or as prescribed.
There was no effective system in place to manage concerns and complaints and where people had raised concerns, these had not been effectively recorded, managed, investigated, and/or responded to.
Quality assurance processes were not effectively implemented and failed to identify the concerns raised at this inspection. Management oversight was ineffective.
People's experience of this service
People and their relatives provided mixed feedback to us about the care and support services they received. Some people said staff were often late arriving for their arranged call times and the length of these calls were sometimes shortened as a result. Some people were unhappy with a lack of continuity in the support they received. They said this was because different members of staff [who did not know them] often arrived to support them. People said communication with them from the office was poor in terms of letting them know if scheduled calls might be late.
Concerns and complaints had not been listened to and rectified and people told us they did not have faith in the service because of this. Whilst people told us most staff were kind and caring, they had concerns about how the service was managed and run, which had impacted them negatively. They told us they did not find the service responsive.