Deteriorating care home where residents' call bells 'tied up out of reach'

Bebington Care Home was given the lowest score of “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission in its most recent inspection, with inspectors raising a number of concerns over the Wirral facility.

They concluded that the home employs an insufficient number of permanent staff, medicines were “not managed safely”, and accidents and incidents were “not adequately reported”. Other staff were reportedly heard saying “they don’t know what’s going on”.

The home said on Monday a “comprehensive action plan” is now in place to turn the situation around.

The CQC report said the quality of care had “deteriorated since the last inspection”, and that “concern” had been raised by the council.

It means the Heath Road home has been placed into special measures, meaning that if not enough improvement is made over the next six months, action will be taken to “prevent the provider from operating the service”.

Judging that people were being “placed at risk of harm” because of staff’s actions at the home, it said: “During our last inspection we had identified that call bells had not been made available for people in their rooms.

“At this inspection we saw that this had not improved. This was also commented on by a relative who told us their family member’s call bell was routinely tied up out of reach.”

A list of other findings at the care home included: “We identified that the system in place for staff to report accidents and incidents was not being used appropriately by staff.

“This meant there was no way [of] identifying trends. Due to the inadequacy of the reporting of accidents and incidents we could not be certain that each person who had had an accident/fall/incident had been treated appropriately or monitored.

“We found that appropriate action had not been taken in response to people’s falls and that the failure to respond had resulted in people being placed at serious risk of further injury.”

It added that there were also failures in using medicines safely, with findings including that records relating to specific patients were “insufficient”, or “not always complete”.

The report was published in April, but full details were only released onto the CQC site last week.

It rated the home, which provides care for up to 87 people, as ‘inadequate’ for the categories of ‘is the service safe?’, ‘effective’, ‘responsive’, and ‘well-led’. The ‘caring’ category received a rating of ‘requires improvement’, meaning the overall score was ‘inadequate’.

The home was criticised too, for the “consistent high use” of agency staff, meaning “no continuity of care”, with some shifts also suffering from a lack of personnel. Agency nurses were reported as saying “they don’t know what’s going on”.

Staff had also received “minimal supervisions or appraisals within the last 12 months”, it said, adding that audits were “ineffective”.

“Due to the lack of effectively kept records we could not be certain that mistakes that had happened had been identified and acted on. This meant lessons would not have been learnt to remove the risk of repeating mistakes,” it said.

Despite the negative findings, the report did reveal some positives, mostly in the ‘caring’ category.

In that section of the report, when residents were asked how they were treated, the response was “mostly positive”, with comments describing staff as “pleasant” and “lovely”, with privacy and dignity of residents respected.

A spokeswoman for Four Seasons Health Care, the organisation in charge of the home, said: “We regret that Bebington Care Home has fallen below the high standards that we expect and that the CQC requires.

“We take our responsibilities as a care provider seriously and have thoroughly reviewed the findings of the latest inspection report. We have put in place a comprehensive action plan and are fully supporting the home to ensure this is delivered.”