Luton's Woodside care home celebrates the Good news!

Woodside Nursing and Residential Care Home, Slip End, received an unannounced, comprehensive inspection from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in November.

The care home had previously been placed in special measures following an inspection in December 2016 and was still in the category after a further one in May.

However, the CQC has now removed the home out of special measures, with Woodside rated as ‘Good’ in the categories ‘Safe’, ‘Effective’, ‘Caring’, and ‘Responsive’, with just ‘Well-led’ rated as requiring improvement.

Commenting on the news that Woodside had received an overall rating of ‘Good’, a proud management representative of Shires Healthcare (Woodside) Ltd, said: “I would like to say that this was only possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of the entire team at Woodside.

“Hopefully we can go on to improve the service even further for our residents.”

The CQC November inspection summary stated: “When we inspected the service in May 2017, we found the provider was in continuing breach of Regulations 9, 12, 17 and 18 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

“This was because people’s care plans lacked information that enabled staff to provide person centred care. Medicines were not always managed safely, staff were not always deployed in a way that promoted safe care , and the provider did not have robust quality monitoring processes in place .

A CQC spokeswoman, said: “In November, while we found there were some areas where further improvements were needed and we will continue to monitor the service, it had demonstrated that sufficient sustainable improvements had been made. The home is therefore no longer rated ‘Inadequate’ and this is why the service has been taken out of special measures, now rated as ‘Good’ overall.”

Well-led ‘required improvement’, as a longer period was needed to ensure that systems and processes had been embedded.

However, with no breaches of regulations, the new report ( January 11) detailed many positive attributes, commenting that people’s medicines were now managed safely, that staff training, supervision and support was now more robust, and that staff understand people’s individual needs, providing effective support.

Residents told the CQC that they were supported by “kind, caring and friendly staff”. One person said: “They are all really lovely here”.

The report also stated that a family member said: “We are always happy when we leave [relative] here. We are confident [relative] gets good care.”

Meanwhile the CQC found detailed planning about care, stating: “For each of the residents whose care records we reviewed, we saw that there was a ‘This is me’ document which detailed their family and life history. This also included their lifestyle, occupation, hobbies and interests, and their aspirations.”