Care Quality Commission takes action to protect people at Holme House Care Home, Cleckheaton

Holme House Care Home, a residential care home in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire has been placed in special measures by the CQC after rating them as Inadequate following an inspection in February.

At the time of the inspection Holme House Care Home was registered to provide residential and nursing care including for people living with a dementia. At the time of the inspection there were 52 people living at the home.  

This service was previously inspected in October 2015 and was rated as Requires Improvement.  

The full report from the inspection can be found here on our website: http://www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-181422619.       

Debbie Westhead, CQC’s Deputy Chief Inspector for Adult Social Care said:

“People are entitled to services which provide safe, effective, responsive and high quality care. We found that the care provided at Holme House Care Home fell a long way short of what we expect services to provide.

“We inspected this home in October last year and told them where they needed to improve. It is disappointing that there has been a lack of action taken since the previous inspection, and also worrying that we found fresh concerns.

“We were worried about the basic safety of people living at this service. There were no fire extinguishers available on some parts of the service, cleaning materials were stored in an unlocked cupboard and there were not enough suitably qualified staff on duty putting people at risk.

“People were not always supported to live in a way which maintained their dignity. We saw people using their fingers to eat food such as scrambled egg and baked beans which is unacceptable. Whilst eating with their fingers may be better for some people, we would expect them to be provided with appropriate finger food.  

“We are working with partners including Kirklees Council to ensure the safety of people using this service.”

Holme House Care Home did not have effective systems in place to monitor the care being delivered to people.

Some of the other findings included:

• There were insufficient numbers of suitably deployed staff to meet people’s needs in a timely manner and people were left unsupervised.
• People told inspectors they were not satisfied with the meals at Holme House and observations of meal times raised concerns about the suitability of the food for some people and the skills and deployment of staff to meet people’s needs.
• Although staff interacted with people with a kind and caring approach, they did not always demonstrate respect for people’s individual likes and preferences.

Services in special measures will be kept under review and, if CQC have not taken immediate action to propose cancelling the provider’s registration, they will be inspected again within six months. The expectation is that locations providing inadequate care should have made significant improvements within this timeframe.

Any regulatory decision that CQC takes is open to challenge by a registered person through a variety of internal and external appeal processes.