A SOUTHAMPTON care service has been branded unsafe in a damning report by the care watchdog.

Standards Care Limited has been rated requires improvement by the Care Quality Commission.

It is a care service providing personal care to people with physical disabilities, mental health or learning disabilities in their own home.

The safety category was rated inadequate, and both the effective and well-led categories were rated as requires improvement.

However, the caring and responsive categories were rated 'good'.

Inspectors found that risks were not fully assessed and that risk assessments were either missing or did not have enough detail, which left patients at a risk of harm.

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In one example highlighted in the report, a person used oxygen therapy and staff told inspectors they put the oxygen on a lower setting than the correct setting confirmed by the manager. This put the person at risk of distress and avoidable harm.

Medicines administration records were not always completed with administration instructions, or the instructions were unclear, the report said.

Inspectors said this meant that it could not be assured that staff were giving people their medicines as per their prescription.

There were also risks of people receiving the wrong dose of medicines, or other errors, such as the wrong time or frequency.

Not all required pre-employment checks were carried out prior to staff working with people, which put people at risk from staff who were not suitable working with them.

Inspectors found that some staff did not have specific training to support people's needs, including one person's oxygen. 

One member of staff was overdue manual handling training by six months.

Despite this, people and their relatives told inspectors that the current staff are "kind and compassionate". 

One relative told inspectors: "They really do care about him."

Another relative said that in the past, staff had been "cruel and unkind", but that those staff no longer worked with their loved one.

The Daily Echo has contacted Standards Care Limited for a comment.

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