Enter and View Report: Charlton Park

The purpose of our visit

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 allows local Healthwatch authorised representatives to observe service delivery at providers across a range of health and social care services such as hospitals, GPs, and care homes. 

Enter and View visits can happen if people tell us there is a problem with a service. They can also occur when services have a good reputation, so we can learn about and share examples of good practice from the perspective of people who experience the service first hand.

Through the programme we help providers to identify what is working well with services and where they could be improved.

How does it work?

Our trained staff and volunteers visit a Greenwich health and social care service. We then spend time at the location, talking both to people receiving care and those providing it.

After our visit, we analyse all the feedback that we have collected and write a report which is published on our website. We share our reports with the organisations involved, the local commissioner, the CQC, and with Healthwatch England. 

To protect the safety of service users and staff, we conduct risk assessments and DBS check all our staff and volunteers. 

Executive Summary

Charlton Park Care Home provides a pleasant environment for residents. Residents in the care home are treated with care, kindness, and courtesy. The home is clean, however in some areas the interior decor is dated and tired. Repair work, and overall updating and refreshing is needed.

The home confirmed that modernisation and refurbishment is an ongoing process. This is something they told us more than two years ago (at our last visit), we were surprised by the slow pace of refurbishment and would have liked to have seen more progress. The weakness in security, raised in our last report, was resolved. Standard security measures are in place and practiced.

On our visit, we were asked to sign in, and our ID was checked. While a range of activities are offered, we would have liked to have seen more dementia friendly activities and more engagement with the local community, including spiritual care. A number of rooms and facilities were used as storage areas, and not available to residents and it was rather sad to see that so many residents stayed in their rooms all day – even at mealtimes. Information provision could be improved, such as re-starting relatives meetings – online or in person, and making sure information on the complaints process is widely and freely available in the home.