A BRADFORD care home has been told it has made “significant improvements” to move it out of special measures.

The Care Quality Commission visited Cooper House Care Home, Cooper Lane, in November last year and judged the service to be inadequate after identifying breaches in a number of areas, including staffing and safe care.

It was placed in special measures and kept under review before being inspected again in July.

While the home has been told it still needs to improve in two areas, relating to safety and management, the health watchdog reported “the service has demonstrated to us that improvements have been made and is no longer rated inadequate overall or in any of the key questions”.

Inspectors judged the home to be good in its effectiveness, responsiveness and how caring it is.

At the time of the visit, 68 people were living in the home, which offers care to older people requiring general and specialist dementia nursing care and residential dementia care.

Inspectors said: “The manager was providing strong leadership and direction and had brought about significant improvements in all areas of the service. We found staff upbeat, enthusiastic and confident, which had a positive effect on the people they cared for.”

They found staff were being recruited safely and there were enough staff to take care of people and to keep the home clean.

The report outlined staff were receiving appropriate training, which was good, and relevant, to their roles.

“People who use this service and their relatives told us staff were helpful, attentive and caring,” inspectors said.

“They also told us they felt safe with the care they were provided with. We found there were appropriate systems in place to protect people from risk of harm.”

The report said care plans were up to date, healthcare needs were being met, the care home was clean and tidy and systems had been introduced to monitor the quality of the service, but added “whilst it was clear the service was on a journey of improvement, it was too early for the provider to be able to demonstrate that the quality processes were fully embedded and that these improvements could be sustained over time”.

The report detailed that some issues had been found with medicine management, leading to the safety aspect of the inspection being judged as requires improvement overall.

Four errors over a three week period were found in a review of night time medication.

In these cases, medicines had been signed off as administered, but the tablets were still in the containers. The report said inspectors were told this could relate to the use of agency nursing staff.

A spokesperson for the home said: “The report shows that the home has made significant progress since the CQC’s last full inspection in November 2016. 

"The home is now rated as ‘good’ in the “is the service responsive”, “is the service effective” and “is the service caring” assessment categories. Inspectors praised the home manager who was appointed in March for “providing strong leadership and direction”.

"We understand the importance of making further improvements and sustaining this level of progress going forwards.”