This inspection took place on 9, 11, 19, 24, 25 and 27 July 2018. We gave the service short notice of our visit to the office base to make sure the registered manager would be available.

Premier Care – Bradford is a domiciliary care agency. It provides personal care to people living in their own homes in the community. It provides a service to adults and older adults. CQC only inspects the service being received by people provided with 'personal care.' At the time of the inspection the service was providing support to a total of 95 people, 30 of whom were receiving personal care.

This was the first inspection of the service since it was registered in August 2017.

There was a registered manager in post. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Although staff could tell us about safeguarding procedures, we found incidents were not always being reported to the local authority safeguarding team. This left people at risk of receiving unsafe care.

Safe staff recruitment procedures were in place. Staff were given training, however, checks to make sure they were applying this to their practice were not always sufficient. This led to people not always receiving the care they wanted or needed. We made a recommendation about checks on staff practice being more robust.

Staff rotas were not always well managed and some people were dissatisfied with the times of their calls as care workers were often late. We have made a recommendation about reviewing staff rota’s to make sure calls are made at the right times.

Medicines were not always managed safely. We made a recommendation about making sure the new medicines procedure was implemented and checks made to make sure it was being adhered to.

People had care plans in place, however, these were not always up to date or being followed by care staff. We made a recommendation about care plans being kept up to date and about staff needing to follow the care plans.

People who used the service and relatives told us the names of some staff they felt were good.

Three out of the five people who used the service and five out of the six relatives we spoke with raised concerns about the service. We found people's complaints were not always responded to. We made a recommendation about staff who are dealing with complaints having additional training to make sure complaints are documented and responded to.

There was a lack of leadership and direction for staff, with no oversight of risks or key issues regarding people's care. Systems and processes for monitoring the quality of the care provision needed to be improved.

Feedback from people who used the service was being sought by the provider.

We found two breaches of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. You can see what action we asked the provider to take at the back of the full version of this report.