CQC Downgrades Rating of Essex Home Care company

Golden Hands Home Care, a domiciliary care agency providing personal care to individuals with physical disabilities and sensory impairments, has received an "inadequate" rating from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) following an inspection in June.

The agency's previous rating of "requires improvement" has been downgraded due to serious concerns identified during the evaluation.

The CQC inspection revealed multiple areas of inadequacy in the agency's operations. Golden Hands Home Care's responsiveness and leadership were rated as "inadequate," indicating a lack of proper management and responsiveness to the needs of service users.

Additionally, while the agency received a rating of "requires improvement" in the areas of safety, effectiveness, and caring, the inspection found significant shortcomings. The agency was flagged for having a closed culture, where staff and service users were discouraged from discussing safeguarding incidents openly. This raised concerns about the well-being and safety of the people under their care.

Hazel Roberts, the CQC Deputy Director of Operations in the East of England, expressed disappointment at the findings, emphasizing the need for rapid and widespread improvements. She stated, "It was worrying that we saw signs of a closed culture, with people being told not to talk about safeguarding incidents, and not feeling safe to raise complaints."

The inspection further highlighted issues related to staffing and training. Many of the staff members were found to be related to one another or had personal relationships, which potentially compromised the quality of care provided. The company director was also unaware of a law change that required staff to receive mandatory training on supporting autistic people and those with learning disabilities. Consequently, not all staff members had received the necessary training in this area.

While some aspects received positive feedback, such as the presence of risk assessments and documentation of preferences for eating and drinking, the overall rating of "inadequate" signifies the urgency for substantial improvements.

As a result of the inspection's findings, the CQC has placed Golden Hands Home Care into special measures to closely monitor their progress in addressing the identified shortcomings. The aim is to ensure the safety and well-being of the 29 people currently using the service.

The CQC will conduct follow-up inspections to assess whether the necessary improvements have been made. Should the agency fail to make satisfactory progress, further actions will be taken to ensure that the individuals receiving care receive the dignified and safe assistance they deserve.

In a statement, Bien Causapin, Managing Director of Golden Hands Home Care, said:

"After 4 years of no visit from the CQC we were happy that they were finally coming for us receive some feedback and a little help. However we were disappointed with the result of their inspection, seeing as the new inspector didn't feel the need to inspect all areas as was the last visit, we were told they would only inspect the areas they feel needs inspecting. On the day of the inspection we gave them the files that they looked for and they seemed content on what they saw as they didn't really dig deep enough on the audits at all. And even said that the inspection went last as long as last time and they would be gone by 2pm. Also when we were having conversation about the complaints procedure I mentioned that we even encourage them to call the CQC directly for any complaints if they don't want to contact us, and they said 'the CQC don't really handle complaints, they can call about it but we can't do anything about them really, we just pass them to relevant team'which obviously shocked me a little bit.

"They said they were happy until they did the phone calls the next day in which they found some people have told them of an incident regarding the agency carers we use to cover the Service users care sometimes. They informed me they can't give any more information regarding this. We launched an investigation regarding the incidents and found no evidence of their claims. However we found other incidents regarding the agency carers that we took action on straight away. I.E making sure the agency carers that the service users wasn't happy with won't be sent to them anymore.

"Regarding the claims we tell people not to talk about safeguarding incidents is not true at all. Staff are trained to raise safeguarding themselves if they feel like they need to. We always get statements from people involved in the safeguarding and make sure its transparent to them that it is a statement for a safeguarding.

"Regarding the close relationship between staff, we have double handed carers which is a husband and wife, they arguably the best carers we have and are always getting praise from the service users. We also have me, the registered manager, and another senior member of staff who is related but we we don't really work on the field together so we only really have the husband and wife team. I do admit that when the CQC has asked for a policy regarding family working together, the few policies we have regarding personal connections at work was not robust enough. However I have asked an outside company to look into it and we are under way into publishing the policy to the staff as soon as it comes out.

"They have also mentioned that people have been accustomed to poor care yet they didn't even come out and see the service users like they did 4 years ago, I can assure the CQC that the service users environment and care is not poor at all. I don't know who made the comment regarding the fact that a service user told them they wouldn't call us if they soiled themselves because we wouldn't send anyone, because they can't tell me really, but I have care logs of carers going to service users not in their designated time and sometimes does extra calls and we as a company dont even charge the council extra for it. I admit there are times service users calls us about needing a carer at that moment and we have had to tell them to wait an hour or so because carers are looking after other service users but most a lot of the times we always come to see service users regarding incontinence as we know how important that is.

"They also said that some people are unhappy we send people of genders that they requested to not be sent, this shocked me because we always tell them the gender of the carers that are on the run that they will be on, we have a lot of single handed carers who only prefers female carers which we always send, our double handed carers are a pair of male and female due to manual handling but we always inform them that this is the case before accepting care packages, this also why we have only a little group of double handed care service users as we don't take the service users that only prefers 2 female carers for example.

"And we then come back to the fact that most service users felt safe with the care workers, to the point that apparently they are afraid of making complaints because they might lose that carer? We in no way threaten service users that they will lose carers or any care for that matter if they complain.

"I have spoken to the care agency that we are contracted with and are happy to make improvements regarding the care, and the monitoring of the said agency carers from the agency and Golden Hands as we are making sure to improve the monitoring of carers.

"We have also sent out anonymous letters to our service users to make sure they can voice their thoughts without having to be worried about their names being known to us, because as I said to the CQC we do a lot of spot checks however they did mention that the face to face spot check might not be enough as the service users might not voice their true self in front of us.

"I look forward to the next CQC visit to show them the improvements that are made and are currently being put in place."

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