A Nursing home has been told it still needs to make improvements after a person died.

Grove Park in The Linkway, Hollingdean, has been told it needed to make improvements after a person in its nursing unit died and an investigation is taking place.

A new report stated inspectors visited after the death of someone in the home's care and it stated that staff had not flagged allegations of abuse.

The report reads "This assessment was undertaken, in part, due to an incident, following which a person using the service died. This assessment did not examine the circumstances of the incident as it is subject to further investigation. Details of the incident indicated potential concerns about the management of falls, so this assessment examined those risks for other people.

"Risks to people were not always fully assessed or managed. Staff and managers did not always understand their responsibilities related to safeguarding and had not always submitted statutory notifications to CQC regarding allegations of abuse. Staff did not always respond to people's calls for assistance in a timely manner."

In the report, one relative told the Care Quality Commission that the service was “improving slightly but there’s a long way to go”.

The report added: "Although the leadership team were working to improve the culture and listen to staff concerns, some staff indicated that they continued to not always feel safe to speak up.”

A previous report into the service in January found that some staff did not feel supported by management and that there was a “closed culture” at the nursing home.

Records showed that call bells had taken as long as 40 minutes to be responded to by some staff.

The latest report, published in October, noted that improvements had been made.

Staff members now noted that they were “more organised” and that the standard of care had “greatly improved in the last few months”.

The report added: “Since the previous assessment improvements had been made in relation to incident reporting and medicines management to ensure safe practice.

“Some leadership and governance measures remained ineffective in identifying shortfalls and failed to assess, monitor and mitigate some risks relating to people’s health, safety and welfare.

“Several changes had been made to the leadership team and a recently appointed manager was working to make further improvements.”

Grove Park was upgraded from being graded “inadequate” to “requires improvement”.