Optima Care · six registered services · Kent and south-west London
The CQC register carries six Optima Care services under two registered providers. One holds a Good. Four hold Requires improvement, published between April 2021 and June 2023. One was registered in March 2025 and has not been inspected. Nothing here forecasts a CQC decision; it is what the register publishes today, read against the national peer sets each service belongs to.
The 30-second read
Registered services
6two providers
Rated below Good
4 of 5one not yet inspected
Oldest standing rating
5.4years · Eastry House
Your recorded service
GoodTeddington, 17 Jan 2024
Every row was read from its own live CQC page this morning. The two providers are linked on the register by a single nominated individual, Ms Lee Anne Houghton. Your recorded service is the Teddington one; which of the other five sits inside a group Head of Quality remit is yours to say, not ours to assume.
Ratings, key questions and dates read from each live CQC page, 22 August 2026 · no service in the group has reached the 6-year adult social care re-assessment band; Eastry House reaches it on 7 April 2027
The spread between the group’s newest and oldest published position is two years and nine months, and it runs across the Good/Requires improvement line. Straddling it is common — 34.8% of the 2,146 adult social care providers running two or more rated services are too. What is less common is how long the below-Good side has stood.
The Good on your recorded service is real and it was earned. It is also assembled from two different inspections, and only one of them is recent.
The six shifts in the guide you downloaded are the rules this analysis is scored against, so we will not re-teach them. The narrower point: every rating in the table above was awarded under the framework that came before the Single Assessment Framework, and not one of the six services has a report published under the SAF — which is itself being replaced. These positions get re-read two framework generations after the evidence behind them was gathered.
Draft Adult Social Care Assessment Framework v9.1, March 2026 · consultation closed 12 June 2026 · still in draft
Read the four Requires improvement ratings side by side and they are not diffuse. Two key questions carry every one of them.
Per-service key-question ratings read from each live CQC page, 22 August 2026
That shape is the sector’s shape. Across England, among the 1,741 services rated below Good under the current framework, Well-led is below Good in 98% of cases and Safe in 95%, against Effective 47%, Responsive 36% and Caring 29%. A rating in this sector rarely falls on the care. It falls on what can be shown about safety and about leadership — which is a question about evidence and oversight, and both of those travel between sites.
Every residential care home in England currently rated below Good, grouped by how long that rating has been published. The median is 2.5 years.
Seahaven sits in the second band. Bon Secours (5.2 years) and Eastry House (5.4 years) sit in the last one, alongside 8.6% of the country. The Chilterns is a nursing home, so it belongs to a different cohort: at 5.0 years it is past five, and of below-Good nursing homes in England 13.6% are past four years and 5.1% past five. None of this predicts when CQC will return; each figure measures how old the record now is.
This table and the one above it are most of what we would walk through live. The 30-minute walkthrough starts from them.
Your recorded service benchmarks against supported living, not care homes. Every supported living service in England carrying a current published overall rating:
Teddington is inside the 85.7% at Good or better, and at 2.6 years its rating is fresher than half the cohort — the median supported living rating is 4.0 years old. It is the strongest and the newest published position in the group, and two of its five key questions have still not been examined since January 2022. Currency and grade are two different exposures, and the average was never the unit of judgement.
All six are drawn from published CQC material or the live register. The strengths come from the January 2024 Teddington report; the watch items are what the record leaves open, not verdicts we are adding.
Medicines was one of the four 2022 breach areas. Inspectors recorded that “how medicines systems were managed had been improved, and people received their prescribed medicines as and when they should”.
The report notes “service quality was reviewed regularly, and appropriate changes made to improve people’s care and support if required”, and that the provider was “no longer in breach of regulations”. That is a documented before-and-after, which is the hardest kind of evidence to produce.
Inspectors recorded that people “were supported to have maximum choice and control of their lives” in “the least restrictive way possible”, and that “the policies and systems in the service supported this practice” — practice tied back to the system holding it.
It states it “only covers our findings in relation to the key questions safe, effective and well-led”, and that for the others CQC “used the ratings awarded at the last inspection”. Two of the five ratings behind the current Good were awarded in January 2022.
Four of the six services name a registered manager on their live CQC page today. The pages for Bon Secours and Seahaven name a nominated individual and no registered manager. Worth confirming whether that reflects the register or the service, because Well-led is already the weaker question at both.
The Meadows was registered on 11 March 2025 and its page reads “we have not inspected this service yet” — seventeen months in. Never-assessed services are one of the three re-assessment priorities CQC has published, and adult social care assessments are not generally announced in advance.
Everything on this page came from the public register and from CQC’s own published reports. That gets us the grades, the dates, the key-question pattern and the peer position. It does not get us the thing that actually decides the next assessment.
Between January 2022 and December 2023 Teddington closed four breaches and moved from Requires improvement back to Good — medicines oversight, staff support, consent recording and the governance cycle rebuilt, with enough evidence for an inspector to accept it. What we cannot see is how much of that is transferable evidence — a system, a cadence, a record another service could be assessed on — and how much of it lives in one team’s practice. That is the difference between a group that has fixed one service and a group that has learned how to fix a service, and it is invisible from the register.
Half an hour answers it: you can see that from inside, we have the outside read.
Six topics, drawn from the specific position above. These are the agenda for the call, not a list to action on your own — each one turns on something only your side can see.
We’d cover these against your live evidence on the call, not hand them over as homework
