‘Repeated shortfalls’ at Hailsham care home

Hailsham House, in New Road Hellingly, was inspected in January and the report was released last week (February 15). The CQC rates care homes on five categories - safe, effective, caring, responsive, and well-led.

The care home, which is run by Hailsham House and Operations Ltd, provides nursing care for up to 90 people and there were 62 people living there at the time of the inspection. It got a rating of requires improvement for four out of five categories, with a good rating for the care category. This equated to an overall rating of requires improvement. Hailsham House was last inspected in August 2019 and it got requires improvement then too.

The report said: “This inspection was prompted due to information received of risk and concern in relation to staffing levels, communication and safeguarding concerns which had impacted on care delivery.

“As a result, we undertook a focused inspection to review the key questions of safe and well-led only. For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating. The overall rating for the service has remained requires improvement. This is based on the findings at this inspection.”

It said the governance of the service hasn’t allowed the home to improve. The report said: “Audit systems and processes whilst in place had failed to identify risks to people's safety and other aspects of the service that required improvement.”

Although the home was noted to have made some improvements in certain areas since the last inspection, there were ‘repeated shortfalls’ and ‘additional concerns’ were raised during this new inspection. It also said there was ‘a lack of clear and accurate records’ around some people’s care and support.

Risk management was an area of concern within the report. It said it needs improvement ‘to ensure peoples’ health and well-being was protected and promoted’. The management of specific health problems and staff practices were other shortfalls raised.

Despite this, staff were praised too. The report said: “People received care and support from staff who had been appropriately recruited and trained to recognise signs of abuse or risk and understood what to do to safely support people. People were supported to take positive risks, to ensure they had as much choice and control of their lives as possible.”

The report finished by saying ‘the provider took immediate action to mitigate risk to people’.

Hailsham House was approached for a comment.

You can read the full report here

More news from Hailsham