Enter and view : Heathside Residential Care Home, Leigh
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Healthwatch Wigan conducted and unannounced Enter and View visit to Heathside Residential Care Home on 8th December 2015. The home provides long term care for residents with advanced dementia.
The visit was followed by at least two visits by the CQC in the past few months and prompted by a request from the Wigan Council Quality Assurance Team, to assess the services provided to residents around lunchtime. Anecdotal evidence suggested that there was little, if any, choice in the menu and that the standard of food was not good. To obtain an accurate reflection of what was happening it was agreed by Enter and View Panel members that the visit should be unannounced.
The report describes the general décor as bland and not very stimulating, with not much activities going on; however the environment was bright and spacious.
Although the Kitchen had a high hygiene rating displayed, the delivery, service and selections of food was very unimpressive. The departure of the cook would appear to have had a detrimental effect on the quality and variety of food provided. The HW team had concerns about the lack of a healthy balanced diet and the provision of fruit and vegetables at every meal. They felt the residents were not supported adequately to ensure that their nutritional needs were met during lunch nor that the food and fluid intakes were monitored and recorded particularly the negative high risks of inadequate food and fluid intake.
The team found the staff were friendly, open, committed and clearly fond of both their work and the wellbeing of the resident family. The home was in a good state of repair with an active improvement programme. However, despite these positives they found serious shortfalls in standard good practice.
Healthwatch made a few recommendations which are detailed in the report along with recommending a further visit in the future to see if the recommendations have been acted upon.
Wigan Council Quality Assurance Team responded thanking HW for their recommendations and iterated that management of Heathside have a plan for service improvement that they are currently working to address to which they will add these recommendations.
The response from the provider came in the form of an action plan and is detailed in the report.