Prospects Home Care Services provides a domiciliary care service to people in their own homes. Its services focus mainly on providing live-in care for adults of any age. At the time of our visit, the agency was providing personal care for one person. This was the first inspection of this service at this location.

The service had a registered manager; however they were on leave during the inspection visit. 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.

The relative of the person using the service provided positive feedback. We found the service to ensure people’s privacy and dignity were respected and promoted. The same staff member was consistently supplied to the person, which helped a positive and trusting relationship to develop.

The service supported people to express their views and be actively involved in making decisions about their care. Individualised care plans were set up from this, and the planned support took place.

There were appropriate assessments of any safety risks associated with the care package. There were enough suitable staff for the service.

Staff were provided with sufficient training and support for their care roles. The service has a sufficiently open and empowering culture, and so staff felt supported to provide care to people.

The provider had procedures in place to prevent abuse and take action if abuse was suspected. This included through appropriate staff recruitment checks, to help ensure only safe staff were supplied to visit people.

There were procedures for managing, monitoring and improving the quality of the service. This included systems for listening to and learning from people’s experiences, concerns and complaints.

Whilst the provider had a broad range of detailed homecare policies, they had not been recently reviewed and updated to ensure they reflected current legislation and best practice. The company director undertook to ensure this occurred.

We have made a recommendation about implementing good practice in relation to the Mental Capacity Act 2005.