Enter and View visit to Ashley House Supported Living Scheme
What we did
Visiting extra care and supported living housing schemes continues to be a strategic priority for the use of our Enter and View powers, as it is often the case that tenants of such schemes have fewer chances to express their views in comparison to people using other health or social care schemes.
In December 2015, we discussed visiting supported living schemes for adults with learning disabilities, with former commissioning manager at Wandsworth Council, who recommended a selection of schemes to visit.
Having held an introductory meeting with care managers at Ashley House, we aimed to use observations and interviews with tenants and the Senior Services Manager during our full site visit at Ashley House on 27th July 2016 to report on:
- How the service operates.
- How far the service is meeting the needs of the tenants.
Key Findings
The feedback from tenants was generally positive.
Most of the tenents felt that staff enabled them to be independent but were on hand for those who needed the extra support, for example by helping to organise appointments with other services and supporting tenants with cooking/shopping.
Our Recommendations
The main area of concern for some tenants was regarding care and support services, as the level of need varied amongst tenants, making it difficult to identify problems with Ashley House and the personal problems in tenant’s lives. Therefore, we recommend the following:
- In some cases, there appeared to be a lack of trust between staff and tenant. We recommend that ideally, Ashley House should aim to achieve good ‘matches’ between staff and tenants.
- Ashley House staff should consider how to identify and support tenants who might benefit from referrals to other services, such as counselling or other mental health services.
- We suggest that Ashley House should consider involving relatives more closely. This need not require highly formalised arrangements: we liked the idea we heard of occasional coffee mornings to discuss matters of common interest.
What happens next
We have shared our findings with the manages we met at Ashley House, providing them with the chance to correct any factual inaccuracies and respond to our recommendations. We have received no reply to date.
Download the reports
If you need this report in a different format please e-mail
enquiries@healthwatchwandsworth.co.uk or call 020 8516 7767
