Serious failings at nursing home
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has taken action to demand immediate improvements after identifying serious failings at a nursing home in Oxfordshire.
CQC carried out an unannounced inspection at Coxwell Hall Nursing Home and Mews in Faringdon in April. The home is registered to provide nursing care for up to 66 older people.
Following the inspection, CQC found that the provider, Sovereign (Coxwell Hall) Limited, had been failing to meet the government’s essential standard relating to safeguarding people from abuse.
As a result, CQC issued a formal warning notice setting a deadline for improvement.
Inspectors found that the home had been failing to take adequate steps to protect people from the risk of abuse. The reasons for minor injuries and bruising had not always been recorded, and there was not always evidence that any investigation had taken place to establish the cause of the minor injury or bruise.
The warning notice has since been complied with. Both reports have been published on the CQC website today.
Ian Biggs, Deputy Director of CQC in the South, said:
“The issues our inspectors identified at Coxwell Hall Nursing Home and Mews were serious, and required immediate action. This is why we issued a warning notice and set a tight deadline by which the provider needed to comply.
“People who live in nursing homes are very vulnerable, and it is very disappointing that the home was not taking the right steps to make sure that their residents were being adequately protected from the risk of abuse.
”Since these serious failings were identified, inspectors have returned to check that Coxwell Hall Nursing Home and Mews had made the required improvements. They were pleased to note that, thanks to our intervention, they had been made. CQC will keep the home under close scrutiny to make sure that it continues to comply with the essential standards that people are entitled to expect.”
A spokesperson for the home said: “We are immensely disappointed that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has chosen to publish a press release we consider to be inaccurate.
“A CQC inspector visited the home in September 2011 and found us to be fully compliant in all five Essential Standards that were inspected. When they visited again in April of this year, they found us to be compliant in four of the same five Essential Standards, yet determined that our safeguarding procedures were non-compliant despite the fact they were unchanged from the previous inspection.
“We have highlighted to CQC major inaccuracies in its investigation which have led to erroneous findings. Unfortunately, CQC has refused to accept that it has misunderstood important facts. Unfortunately we are prevented from going into detail for reasons of confidentiality."