The Willows

Updated 12 September 2024

Date of assessment 29 October 2024 to 9 December 2024. We visited the service on 29 October 2024 and 6 November 2024, with one visit being in the evening. The Willows is a residential care home, providing support to adults who live with a learning disability and/or autism. We found two breaches of the legal regulations in relation to safe care and treatment and governance. We found parts of the service to be unclean and in need of maintenance to ensure peoples safety. Where risk assessments in peoples care plans had identified actions required to keep people safe, these had not always been followed. Whilst the provider undertook internal quality audits, these were not always effective at identifying concerns and driving improvements. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.

Updated 12 September 2024

Most people living at the service had limited mental capacity to give feedback to us on their experience of living at The Willows. Therefore, we sought feedback from relatives and undertook observations of the care people received whilst we were at the service. Overall, relatives spoke positively of The Willows, and felt the service had improved over the last 12 months. We observed people to receive care from people who knew them well, and the atmosphere was warm and friendly. However, the environment people lived in was not always clean and some areas were in a poor state of repair. Some people had not been protected from the risk of harm as outlined within their care plans.