About the service: Westminster Homecare Limited (Leicester) is a domiciliary care agency providing personal care to people living in their own homes in the Leicester city and Leicestershire area. At the time of the inspection 340 people were receiving personal care.

People’s experience of using this service:

¿People continued to be cared for safely and with compassion.

¿Staff were friendly, caring and passionate about their work; they treated people with respect and maintained their dignity.

¿The service had a positive ethos and an open culture. The registered manager was approachable, understood the needs of people, and listened to staff.

¿People had detailed personalised plans of care in place to enable staff to provide consistent care and support in line with people’s personal preferences.

¿Staff knew their responsibilities as defined by the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA 2005). The provider was aware of how to make referrals if people lacked capacity to consent to aspects of their care and support and were being deprived of their liberty.

¿People were protected from the risk of harm and received their prescribed medicines safely.

¿Staff were appropriately recruited and there were enough staff to provide care and support to people to meet their needs.

¿Staff had access to the support, supervision and training they required to work effectively in their roles.

¿Information was provided to people in an accessible format to enable them to make decisions about their care and support.

¿People knew how to raise a concern or make a complaint and the provider had implemented effective systems to manage any complaints received.

¿There were effective systems in place to monitor the quality of the service and drive improvements.

¿The service met the characteristics for a rating of “good” in all the key questions we inspected. Therefore, our overall rating for the service after this inspection was “good”.

More information is in the full report.

Rating at last inspection: Good (report published 16 August 2016)

Why we inspected: This was a planned inspection based on the rating at the last inspection.

Follow up: We will continue to monitor the service through the information we receive until we return to visit as per our re-inspection programme. If any concerning information is received we may inspect sooner.

For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk

Westminster Homecare Limited provides personal care for people living in their own homes. On the day of the inspection the registered manager informed us that there were 272 people receiving personal care from the service.

A registered manager was in place. 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 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Staff had awareness of people's health care needs so they were in a position to refer to health care professionals if needed, though this had not always been carried out. Staff recruitment checks were not comprehensively in place to protect people from receiving personal care from unsuitable staff.

People had not all received personal care at the assessed and agreed times to promote their health.

Risk assessments were in place to protect people from risks to their health and welfare.

People and their relatives we spoke with said they thought the agency ensured that people received safe personal care. Staff had been trained in safeguarding (protecting people from abuse) and staff understood their responsibilities in this area.

We saw that medicines were supplied safely and on time, to protect people’s health needs.

Staff had training to ensure they had the skills and knowledge to be able to meet people's needs, though more training was needed to help ensure all people’s needs could be fully met.

Staff understood their responsibilities under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) to allow, as much as possible, people to have effective choice about how they lived their lives.

People and their relatives we spoke with told us that staff were friendly, kind, positive and caring.

People, or their relatives, were involved in making decisions about how personal care was to be provided.

Care plans were individual to the people using the service to ensure that people's individual needs were met. though they lacked some information about people's history and lifestyle to ensure that a fully personalised service could be provided to them.

People or their relatives told us they would tell staff or management if they had any concerns and were confident any issues would be properly followed up.

People and their relatives were satisfied with how the service was run by the management. Staff felt they were fully supported in their work by management staff.

Management carried out audits in order to check that the service was meeting people's needs and to ensure people were provided with a quality service.