Enter and View: Cherry Orchard Nursing Home, Dagenham, Essex

Healthwatch Barking and Dagenham conducted an Enter and View on Cherry Orchard Nursing Home Derby, a privately owned nursing home catering for various levels of dementia. The visit was conducted on 15th January 2018.

The home is run by Care UK Ltd and has 38 individual rooms. Not all rooms were occupied on the day of the visit.

This visit was undertaken as a direct result of feedback received from individuals from the local area who knew people using this service.

Observation by the enter and view representatives reported that:

At the time of the visit, representatives were informed that a manager was being recruited and expected to take up post by March 2018.

Overall, for the specific areas of the service that Healthwatch focused on during the visit, representatives agreed that the service was satisfactory.

There were some concerns from the feedback received, that the quality of care was at times, being negatively affected by the number of staff available to adequately coverall the units. The living areas were clean and tidy - staff were observed helping residents with their food, leaving others to feed themselves. Representatives saw that there were communal areas used for activity and other lounges that had residents sitting around with a TV on not doing much. Although activity schedules were visible on the walls of each unit, there was nothing written on them for anyone to see what was planned for the forward programme of events. To help residents relate to and remember life experiences, tactile areas in each of residential wings of the home, are situated in the corridors. Each unit had themed pictures on the walls too. The home has a large garden area with pathways around it, interspersed with various themed set ups to remind residents of some of their life experiences. For example; there was a chicken coup with chickens in.

The following recommendations were made:

A re-occurring theme from the visit was that there are often times that residents didn’t get the care and support that they needed due to the number of staff available, being stretched to work across the three units of the home. Healthwatch would like to know what measures are being taken to ensure that all residents get the care and support they need on a daily basis and that additional staff are employed to provide the standard of service that residents need.

It is a concern that dental hygiene for residents doesn’t seem to happen often enough and that it could have a detrimental effect on their health. Healthwatch recommends that regular dental health checks are included in individuals’ care plans and that the appropriate arrangements are put in place to ensure that residents with challenging behaviour are supported to see a dentist regularly.

Visible schedules should be fully completed so that people can see and are aware of future plans for entertainment and other activities for the residents.

At particular times, when reception and front desk staff are not available, the home should consider having an alert system in place that indicates to other staff when guests coming to visit residents need to be let in through the secure gate. This is so visitors are not left waiting outside for lengthy periods of time.

Care UK provided a reponse on the 8th May 2018 despite the visit being in January 2018.

The response answered all recommendations and agreed to make some changes icluding a manager being in place.