Enter & View Report: Westcombe 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 and recommendations
Westcombe Park Care Home is a modern purpose-built care home situated in a pleasant leafy area of Greenwich. There is a bus stop directly in front of the main gate towards Greenwich West or Woolwich and the closest train station (Westcombe Park) is just 10 minutes away. The home is welcoming and homely, hosting a wide range of activities and catering for residents of varying levels of independence. We observed caring and compassionate interactions between staff and residents.
Staff are friendly, helpful, and committed to creating and maintaining high standards of care. Staff know residents well and residents had mostly positive feedback about staff, facilities, and the care received.
Residents with capacity and motivation to do so can participate in regular internal and external activities (such as visiting local shops). However, high care needs mean that most residents spend most of their time in their room.
Recommendations
1. Recommendation: Refresh and tidy areas of the garden.
2. Recommendation: Display photographs and names of key staff members in communal areas to assist both residents and visitors.
3. Recommendation: Paint all handrails in the building a contrasting colour to the walls to assist residents with dementia and sight impairments.
4. Recommendation: Have memory boxes or more personalised name signs on each resident’s door.
We are grateful to Bupa UK who have responded to our recommendations and already taken action in several areas. They have:
- Started to tidy up the garden
- Installed a board in the communal area to display staff names and pictures
- Painted handrails blue (contrasting colour to the walls)
- Worked with families and carers to personalise each entrance to residents' rooms
