Working at St James House

Not all risks had been safely managed at St James House. On our arrival we found a door that led to a large basement... open and led to a basement that was being used as a storage room... contained a large amount of combustible material... no night-time fire drills... night-time checks were not being recorded with the correct frequency.

We reviewed the training matrix and saw that several staff had training in de-escalation and physical intervention that had recently gone out of date. We also saw that the service required some staff to complete fire marshal training.

At the time of our inspection the registered manager had recently left the service, and a new manager had started and was in the process of registering with CQC.

People's activities were being recorded by staff daily, but they contained mostly activities of daily living. For example, one person had five entries for one day but these consisted of making a cup of tea, laundry, personal care, taking the bins out and listening to music.