If ever anyone checks the CSCI website for the “star rating”, then please be aware of the precise date of that star rating, (and then ask CSCI the basis for that rating), which may be many months before the most recent CSCI inspection and UNPUBLISHED report. And it may also be many many months after CSCI became aware of enormous problems with any particular care home.
A CSCI rating is no guarantee of quality – and therefore no guarantee that standards have not perhaps improved massively since the last inspection and subsequent ‘rating’. Or that standards have perhaps declined massively since the last inspection and recent ‘rating’.
As we have found, a ‘star rating’ was added to the CSCI website about one particular care home, which meanwhile was being heavily investigated. Investigated because of serious concerns and problems about the level of care being provided to the residents.
That did not prevent CSCI from adding a ‘star rating’, just before and more importantly, during that investigation, and even more importantly just weeks before the findings were revealed.
And that ‘star rating’ today would be very very different from the star rating achieved between the initial inspection (9 months before the star rating appeared on CSCI website) and the appearance of that particular star rating (9 months after the inspection).
In fact, that particular care home is subject now to an enforcement notice, which is a step before closure, in order to protect all the residents living there. Even though no-one wishes to move their own relatives with dementia by force, from one care home to another, unless they are receiving less-than-acceptable standards of care.
And that care home will only be closed, if that particular care home is deemed to be operating either against the law, or against the legally acceptable care standards that should, by law, be made available to all of the residents living there.
Just a word of caution when consulting the CSCI website.
So, as DianeB said, do not believe everything you read about star ratings.
And as should be obvious by now, unless you have a way of being shown positive evidence of staff turnover, then don’t even bother to ask the question. Or any other question, unless you can be shown positive evidence.
All staff will answer questions posed to them, (as merlin says) but can anyone know the extent of their ‘tutoring’, being instructed how to answer those questions posed to them by relatives.
If a ‘purge’ is in place once a month, then that is good news. But only if those belongings can be seen to be returned to the original owner.
We should all learn to become as cautious as we can about any reply to any questions.
Yes, of course, there will be some people who have the most fantastic luck out there with choice and quality of care home. But there are also many out here who have had no such luck, and there are perhaps many of those “luck-losers” who cannot begin to find the strength to face the constant barrage of “well, we’ve never had any complaints before; most people are hugely satisfied with the care we provide”.
So, sorry to rain on anyone’s parade, but the reality is the very real and genuine reality for some of us who are not so fortunate as others.
That perhaps goes with the territory of being disabled by any single problem: some of us are perhaps more fortunate than others in our experiences. But that must grant them the right to express their words of caution, based on their own experience.