Fethneys Living Options - Care Home Physical Disabilities

The following is CQC's published account of its assessment, published 8 July 2025. References to “we” mean CQC. It describes findings at that time.

Date of Assessment: 15 May to 20 May 2025. We assessed a small number of quality statements from the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led key questions and found areas of good practice and some concerns. The scores for these areas have been combined with scores based on the key question ratings from the last inspection.

Though the assessment of these five key questions indicated some areas of concern as well as good practice since the last inspection, our overall rating remains requires improvement.

The assessment was undertaken to review compliance with 3 Warning Notices issued in February 2025 in relation to person-centred care, safe care and treatment and good governance. The service is a residential care home providing support to people living with physical disabilities and/or learning disabilities and autistic people.

We assessed the service against ‘Right support, right care, right culture’ guidance to make judgements about whether the provider guaranteed people with a learning disability and autistic people respect, equality, dignity, choices, independence and good access to local communities that most people take for granted.

Improvements have been made since the last assessment, but these need to be embedded and sustained to ensure people receive a good standard of care. This is a continuing breach of regulation in relation to good governance. The last manager had implemented some new auditing systems to measure and monitor the care overall. The new manager had only been in post a few weeks at the time of this assessment, and needed to familiarise themselves fully with people’s care plans, as well as the new systems that had been put into effect.

Incidents were reported and managed well to protect people from harm. Recruitment systems were effective in ensuring new staff were suitable and safe to work in a care setting. There were sufficient staff to meet people’s care and support needs. Before people came to live at the home, their care and support needs were assessed to ensure these could be met appropriately. Consent to care and treatment was gained lawfully, although an application for 1 person’s Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards could not be found. The provider was contacting the local authority to find out how the application was progressing.

We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.