The inspection was carried out on 18 December 2017. The inspection was announced.

Hilton Nursing Partners Limited is registered with CQC to provide personal care to people in their own home. The service is provided immediately following discharge from hospital for a limited number of days, supporting and allowing people time to re-adjust to living at home, whilst during this time establishing together what a person’s on-going needs may be. The office for the service is based in Ashford, and services are provided throughout Kent and Essex. At the time of the inspection the service was providing support to between one hundred and one hundred and fifty people, who mostly received a service for three days in Kent or five days in Essex following discharge from hospital. Sometimes the time would be extended as nobody would be left without appropriate support in place. The support provided by staff aims to enable people to live, regain confidence and for them to remain in their own home, as the care provided is uniquely tailored to the individual’s needs to support their recovery. One member of staff told us, “The service gets people home quickly from hospital, as sometimes it can take weeks to get a package of care organised”. They told us that they had known many successful cases, where the person had then become sufficiently independent to remain in their own home.

Information provided to people about what the service provides states, ‘Providing integrated health and social care to deliver innovative services that enable people to continue to live independently. Our success is measured by our ability to get people out of hospital and minimise their on-going social care needs’. The impact on people was summed up by one social care professional who told us, “The service offers a pathway from hospital that sees the person’s dependency upon social care reduced or eliminated”. Discussions with people showed that the impact on many of the people that the service had provided support for meant that people referred to Hilton Nursing Partners on discharge from hospital, had an opportunity with support from the staff team to regain their independence and remain in their own home.

There was a registered manager for the service. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are 'registered persons'. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

The exceptional outcomes people experienced were made possible by the close working relationship between the hospital teams, and the service. The Hilton Nursing Partners teams succeeded by bringing a range of staff skills to people. For example, professional health care managers, clinical team leaders who were registered nurses, specialist assessors, coordinators and health care assistants. Additionally in East Kent, Occupational Therapists work within the multi-skilled teams providing expertise and a person centred approach to people’s care.

People told us they consistently received an excellent service which made a difference to their lives. Those people who used the service expressed satisfaction and spoke very highly of the management team and staff. For example, people said, ‘Thank you all so much for the care, kindness and support you have given to us over the past weeks. We are so grateful to you all for helping to make life more bearable. It was so comforting to know that you were there for us’, ‘Thank you for your care and support over these past days that have really been quite hard for us as a family. You have a gift of helping people and we have appreciated it so much from day one until now’, ‘Thank you so much for taking such good care of X last week, following his discharge from hospital. You were all so cheerful, kind and understanding. You helped him so much through a di