Concern as inspectors find care home standards are slipping across Bradford district

Inspectors from the Care Quality Commission have visited 50 homes across the district in 2017 so far, but found that nearly two-thirds of them were either inadequate or required improvement.

Now local health and care bosses have said they are “concerned” by what appears to be a drop in standards.

Councillor Val Slater, the portfolio holder for adult social care at Bradford Council, said: “There is a real crisis, I think, at the moment, in actually getting appropriate qualified staff, not only in our care homes but in our hospitals.

“We are working together to see what we can do to help resolve this situation.”

Overall, just over half (56 per cent) of the 111 care homes in the district are meeting standards and are currently rated as good or outstanding.

However, a closer look at the data suggests there has been a significant dip in ratings handed out since the beginning of this year.

The T&A’s analysis has found that of the 50 homes inspected so far in 2017, only around a third (38 per cent) were found to be good, while 62 per cent were rated as either inadequate or requiring improvement.

Bradford Care Association, which represents the majority of the local care home market, has been working with its members to try to improve inspection pass rates.

Chairman Konrad Czajka said they had a ‘buddy’ system in which good homes supported struggling ones, as well as advice sessions.

But he said the north of England as a whole was “particularly struggling with the CQC inspections”, for a number of reasons.

Mr Czajka said Bradford had a high number of smaller care homes in converted Victorian properties, which tended to see them get poor safety ratings.

He said: “They’ve probably small, Victorian properties where they have got steps and are not able to put in a state-of-the-art lift.

“You have got old buildings which are very, very difficult to adapt to modern standards.”

He said difficulties with recruitment and retention, caused by inadequate funding, meant many homes were not able to fill vacancies for registered managers.

He said: “Where they don’t have a registered manager in place, the CQC inspectors won’t give a good rating so they can only get a ‘requires improvement’.”

Most care homes are run privately, but local councils have a duty to develop a market that delivers high-quality care services.

Cllr Slater said the Council was using extra social care funding given out recently by the Government to increase the fees it paid to care homes, “but if we give extra fees to them, then we expect them to up the quality as well”.

She said they were also hoping to set up a care-based Industrial Centre of Excellence to offer people training and career development.

She added: “If a care home does get a low rating, then we are quite happy as a Council to go in and help them with their improvement plan. On a number of occasions, we have put our own staff in there free of charge to help them towards raising their ratings.”

A spokesman for the authority added that they did not place elderly or disabled people in care homes which were given inadequate ratings, saying: “The authority is concerned and has put robust processes in place to monitor standards in the independent care home market.”

Councillor Jackie Whiteley, opposition Conservative spokesman for adult social care, said she would be asking senior officers what lay behind the falling ratings.

She said: “Looking at the raw data it appears that a significant number of care homes require improvement in the Bradford District but I would like to know what has brought them into this category because the CQC measure homes on a wide range of criteria.

“I shall be asking this question of the Council’s strategic director of health and wellbeing because this will tell me what individual homes in Bradford need to improve on and whether we should be concerned about the standard of care in the district.

“It could be that the quality of care isn’t good enough but equally it could be about not having written policies in place, for example, about how medicines are dealt with.

“Whatever the reasons they need to be put right as soon as possible so that people in the district can feel confident that they receive the highest standards of care.”

The CQC did not respond to requests for a comment.

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