Enter and View visit to Harding House and Huguenot Place, residential care homes for adults with mental health problems and deafness

Report - 30 September 2015

Healthwatch Wandsworth were invited to visit Harding House and Huguenot Place to understand resident’s views on the quality of care they were receiving. Our report is based on what people told us and what we saw during our visit.

What we did

Visiting care homes that do not provide nursing continues to be a strategic priority for the use of our Enter and View powers. We feel that these homes get less scrutiny than other health and social care services.

Care of residents at both Harding House and Huguenot Place are provided by Action on Hearing Loss.

The age range of residents is from late 30s to late 60s.

All residents are deaf and with mental health problems, learning difficulties or both.

Most of the residents are fully mobile but a few have some limitations to their mobility. For some the homes will be their permanent home, whilst others aimed to move onto more independent living.

The homes worked with people to help them achieve their goals on an individual basis through their care plan and key worker system.

We aimed to use interviews with residents during our visit to Harding House and Huguenot Place on 10^th July 2015 to report on:

The quality of individual care.
The responsiveness of services to individual residents’ needs.

In total we spoke to seven residents.

Key Findings

The feedback from residents living in Harding House and Huguenot Place were very positive.

The majority of residents were able to live an ordinary life, by shopping independently, exercising, visiting friends and family, and participating in organised activities.
Most residents felt supported by staff, and felt staff were approachable and helpful.
There was very little negative feedback.
The main concern was that some residents seemed unaware that they had a care plan, nor could they identify their key worker.
This is most likely due to the care plans only being available in files held in the office.

Our Recommendations

Overall, there is generally high resident satisfaction with the quality of service. We recommended that the following areas were reviewed:

The homes’ consider making the care plan for each resident available to them in their own rooms rather than in a file in the office. This might also be done to reinforce the names of key staff that work with the resident within and outside the home.
The homes use the resources of a new activities coordinator to help ensure that the focus goes beyond the arrangement of group activities, looking at every resident’s preferences for how they would like to spend their time.