A court has suspended a care home’s licence on Health & Safety grounds.

Concerns were first raised last August when the Care Inspectorate told owners of the East Renfrewshire home to make urgent changes.

Issues raised included:

• the way medicine was kept and administered
• staff numbers and training
• residents’ care plans

Inspectors ‘strongly’ welcomed the decision to suspend Greenlaw Grove’s registration from 21 March 2018.

Staying safe

A Care Inspectorate spokesperson said closure would help keep people safe who would otherwise have been at ‘significant risk’.

They added “’his is not action we take lightly but is essential to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of residents’.

Poor and inconsistent

East Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership regularly met with the home’s owners and managers to encourage improvements.

It said ‘We increased our monitoring activity and have had staff in the home at an increased frequency – including nurses, social workers and contract management colleagues’.

Despite this care standards remained ‘poor and inconsistent’ and not of the expected quality.

Improvement notice

The closure comes five months after bosses were served with a formal improvement notice.

The notice said management must ‘demonstrate to the Care Inspectorate that members of staff are appropriately deployed as necessary to meet the health, welfare and safety needs of service users at all times’.

Homeowners also had to show staff had received training in several areas including manual handling, infection control, stress and distress and adult support and protection.

The owners claimed to have ‘taken swift action to put things right’.

But the Care Inspectorate found ‘sufficient progress’ had not been made. It informed the court of the ‘unacceptable quality of care, leadership, staffing and environment’.

East Renfrewshire Council has cancelled its care contract with the home.