Ms Carol Grogan:

On the capacity legislation, it will support, as I said, but will not take away from what we do and where we go in to ensure that residents are consulted with and included. There are many ways of including residents and people who may not have capacity. We will continue through our regulations to ensure this happens. This is about looking at how all of this comes together. If we have safeguarding legislation along with our legislation and, hopefully, potentially, the reform of our legislation with updated regulations in the near future, along with the capacity legislation, it will be about ensuring that it all works together to better support the person, and for that person to be able to articulate their rights and to live their life. One of the quotes that sticks in my head from the report on Tuesday is: “I have the same rights as everybody else.” This is such a strong statement to make and if we keep that at the fore of everything we do, then all the legislation and supports can better support the person.

On urgent actions, it can be a variety of things. If there is insufficient staffing or staff mixes on duty, we may require the provider to bring in additional staff there and then if that is having an impact on the residents. For example, in the case of fire issues, this would arise if a fire exit was blocked. This would also arise if training had not been delivered to staff and if they were not knowledgeable about how to best support residents in the event of an emergency. We would be aware that training cannot be done before we leave but we would want to be given a date as to when that training will be delivered before we left. If the provider had not reviewed governance and management, we might call a meeting with the provider there and then.

Before we leave any inspection we give clear feedback before the report arrives so that we expect providers to start actioning those areas before they get the report because we will have given them this feedback.

These urgent actions then can be for a variety of things and we look very much to what the impact and the risk to the resident or residents are in these cases.