The owner of a Burnham-On-Sea care home for mentally ill people that has been criticised by the Care Quality Commission for the second time in a year has this week said it is committed to ensuring people there are “healthy and safe.”
It’s emerged this week that Highbridge Court care home, which is located in Berrow Road near the junction with Gore Road, received an unannounced inspection in January and was rated as ‘requires improvement’ in four out of five areas, after it ‘had not ensured that people were protected against some key risks’.
It comes after a previous inspection in 2015 which placed the care home into special measures.
The CQC said that it would be “taking further action” against the home. The report states that “the amounts of medicines that were recorded as being in stock were not always the same as the actual medicine in stock.”
It also went on say that “people’s mental health needs may not have been fully supported” and that there had been repeated breaches of the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
A spokesman from Trascare, which runs the care home, said this week: “We always take feedback from the CQC extremely seriously. Immediately after the inspection in January we put in place a detailed action plan to address the areas identified as requiring improvement. Our absolute priority is to ensure the people we support are healthy and safe.”
Deborah Ivanova, deputy chief inspector for adult social care in London and the South, said: “People are entitled to services which provide safe, effective, compassionate and high quality care.”
“If we find that a service requires improvement, we will expect them to provide us with a full plan setting out how they will address the issue. We will share our findings with local commissioners, and we will return in due course to check that they have made the required improvements.”
Some of the people who use the service have complex mental health issues, and this latest rating comes just six months after the last care home rating of “inadequate’”.
After an inspection last year, the CQC noted that ‘the service was not fully caring, and people’s privacy and dignity was not always fully respected’. It also stated that ‘Risks to people were poorly managed’.
