Rosepark inquiry : Care boss tells of checks on safety

The boss of Scotland’s care industry watch dog told the Rosepark inquiry that inspectors took a “common sense approach” to evaluating services.

Jackie Roberts, chief executive of the Care Commission, made her comment at the Motherwell probe into the deaths of 14 elderly people at the home in Uddingston in 2004.

She said would expect her team to focus on interviewing residents, staff and relatives about their experience of a home, rather than trawling through mountains of paperwork to check if every policy and procedure was being followed correctly.

The Commission’s National Care standards were “lengthy and many” said Mrs Roberts. She added: “I do acknowledge we were required to check up on the service providers and make sure they were aware of the regulations and their responsibility to implement them. But the regime was designed to take people away from ticking boxes.”

Questions have previously been raised during the inquiry about how Commission inspectors failed to highlight a number of shortcomings in Rosepark’s fire safety records, including a lack of regular fire drills and staff training.

However Mrs Roberts said the list of 20 care standards and their subsections essentially provided a “mechanism to focus the inspectors”. She said if an inspector had concerns a home was failing to meet one of the criteria, including fire safety, they would not automatically penalise the owners.

She was asked by Advocate Depute Robert Weir QC how she would expect the care standards to be used by home owners and inspectors. Mrs Roberts replied that she would expect service providers and their staff to be well aware of those standards, and that they promote those standards.

She added: “When it comes to enforcement, that’s a very different matter … it’s a common sense approach.”

Mrs Roberts, who worked as the director of social work at Dundee City Council before taking up her role with the Care Commission in 2001, said she had been very conscious of the risk of fire in her previous employment.

She had made a point, she said, of personally inspecting the 10 local authority homes that fell within her remit, checking to make sure they were up to date with fire drills and fire safety training. She added that this action was taken after a blaze at a council–run care home.

The inquiry continues.