A NURSING home in Chester-le-Street for people with dementia has been branded inadequate by inspectors twice in a matter of months.

The Lindisfarne Chester-le-Street Nursing Home, in Whitehill Park, was given five formal warnings to make immediate improvements after an unannounced visit by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in July and August of last year.

The CQC said it went to the home “in response to information of concern”.

In the first report published in September, it found the home was failing to provide care that was safe, effective, caring, responsive or well-led, the five national standards that providers have to meet.

Inspectors went back to the home, which is run by the Chester-le-Street firm Gainford Care Homes Ltd, in October and, in their report published last month, again rated the service inadequate overall.

The CQC is now considering what action to take.

In the safe service category, the CQC said:“We found staff had not been safely recruited and where some staff had indicated they had committed offences these were not followed up or risk-assessed to see if they were safe to work with vulnerable people.

“We found there were insufficient numbers of staff to meet the needs of the people that used the service.”

The home was insufficiently clean to reduce the risk of infections spreading, the CQC said.

They found the service was not effective and “not caring”.

The inspectors said: “We observed instances where people at the home who needed individual medical treatment did not receive this in a caring or respectful way.

“We found some people’s rooms had no personal possessions or no individual items at all.”

But they added: “We saw some people who needed support with eating were treated in a caring way with staff describing food types before giving it to them.”

The inspectors concluded that the service was not responsive as it lacked “person-centred care” and care planning for residents with challenging behaviour was not robust.

The service was not well-led as there was no registered manager for over a year and no routine monitoring of the care provided.

“The provider had failed to respond to CQC enforcement action.

“The provider did not make improvements to the quality and safety of services for people at the home in a timely fashion in order to adequately protect them from receiving poor care.”

The firm did not respond before deadline to a request for a comment.