Enter and view: Ripley Treatment Centre

Healthwatch Derbyshire carried out an enter and view visits as a follow up to the concerns raised in their July 2016 report 'Substance Misuse: Experiences of individuals living with substance misuse accessing health and social care services in Derbyshire.'.

This report generated 19 subsequent recommendations for consideration across a range of agencies and services including the treatment services. The main provider at the time, DHcFT concurred with the issues of concern raised and had already made plans to reconfigure the services in order to make it more effective and efficient. The follow up visits created a report covering the whole service called 'Substance misuse and alcohol services summary report'.

This is the enter and view report for one of the sites - Ripley Treatment Centre- that make up the substance misuse service in Derbyshire, consisting of two visits - one announced, one 'semi-announced'.

There were 8 visits making up the whole service report to four treatment centres at Ilkeston, Chesterfield, Ripley and Swadlincote. These treatment centres cover substance misuse and alcohol dependency and include outreach services.

Findings and themes observed by the enter and view representatives at Ripley treatment centre included:

 Generally clients were very satisfied with the service and support of key workers

 The overall building décor, maintenance and general ‘house-keeping’ needs attention

 The range of facilities and services available to clients may need to be made clearer to them

Healthwatch Derbyshire made 5 recommendations in the report, including:

 To confirm that notices are in place to inform visitors of CCTV being in operation

 To review general house-keeping services and impact of auditing to ensure a satisfactory standard is maintained with particular attention to the Family Room

 To check that the self-locking mechanism on the front door operates effectively

The report includes a detailed response from the service provider.