A Gospel Oak care home made no notes of a patient’s penicillin allergy on the medical charts, a care watchdog report found

A care home looking after 60 elderly residents, most of whom have dementia, made mistakes on patients’ medical charts.

Wellesley Road Care Home, run by private provider Shaw Healthcare, was given a “requires improvement” rating from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) this week.

The CQC found one elderly resident’s seafood and penicillin allergies were not noted on the medical chart.

This put them “at risk of harm” as the pharmacy and GP were unaware of the allergies.

Another resident had a lower leg fracture and was not given pain relief for seven days.

The pharmacy had run out of their medicine, and no one followed it up.

Another person was prescribed “high risk” medicine and needed to have the medicine 30 minutes before eating in the morning.

They also had to be in an upright position for 30 minutes after taking it.

There was no record of these instructions on the care plan, although the manager said her staff knew how to give the medicine safely.

When inspectors checked stocks of medicine against medical charts, they found that for nine people, there were either too many or too few tablets left in stock.

Concerns were also raised over the number of agency staff.

One staff member told inspectors: “We don’t always have time to spend on residents on one to one basis. In general staff are really hard working but there are so many agency that don’t know people, I spend more time trying to sort them out.”

But the CQC report found the care home was “caring” and “responsive”, with residents engaging with activities and smiling.

Wellesley Road Care Home is run by private provider Shaw healthcare.

Liam Scanlon, director of governance and compliance at Shaw healthcare said: “We’re committed to making the improvements highlighted by the CQC report as a priority to ensure that each and every one of our residents receives the best possible care. The report found that we provide a caring and responsive service and we have an action plan to ensure that we go on to match these standards across all aspects of our care.”