First Choice Home Care

“First Choice Home Care (Snetterton) is a domiciliary care agency providing personal care support to people living in their own homes. At the time of the assessment there were 56 people who were in receipt of the regulated activity of personal care. We had previously inspected the service on 12 August 2022 focusing on the key questions of safe and well-led. We rated the service requires improvement with a breach of Regulation 17 Good governance. We undertook our assessment because of a number of identified risks which could impact on the experiences of people using the service. Our assessment activity started on 9 January 2025 and ended on 5 February 2025. We visited the office location on 9 January 2025. We completed a full comprehensive assessment and looked at all the quality statements within the 5 key questions. At the time of our assessment the service manager was not registered with the Care Quality Commission. The onsite inspection was announced. This was because we needed to be sure that the provider or service manager would be available to support the inspection. The inspection was undertaken by two inspectors and one Expert by Experience. An Expert by Experience is a person who has personal experience of using this type of service. During our assessment, we identified concerns with how the service was being managed and found improvements were needed for new systems and ways of working to be firmly embedded. We identified issues relating to a lack of management oversight and poor governance. Additionally we found concerns around the systems and processes in place for handling complaints. The provider had previously been in breach of regulation 17: good governance and insufficient progress had been made which meant they were still in breach of this regulation. The provider was also found to be in breach of regulation 13: safeguarding service users from abuse and improper treatment. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to concerns found.”