Healthcare at Home

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :11/04/2008 15:37:37

For 13 years Mike Gordon has worked alongside Charles Walsh for Healthcare at Home. He explains how he got involved and why the company is so popular

Written by Lucy Mowatt and Produced by Kiron Chavda

Founded in Greenwich in 1992, Healthcare at Home is a company that has grown rapidly in the past 16 years. Having spent years convincing medical insurance companies to cover nurses providing treatments in patients’ homes, Charles Walsh met pilot Mike Gordon in 1995, and since then the two have built a company which has seen significant growth.

Although Mike’s leap from pilot to CEO of a medical service company might seem illogical, Mike explains that it was an easy decision for him to make. “When I left the Air Force, I did what most pilots do, I got a job with one of the airlines and I was waiting to start my course when I met Charles,” he says. “I bought into his vision for the company. I really wanted to do something that I thought would benefit people.”

And the company really has made a difference, affirming his choice to change career. “Feedback from patients is marvellous. It’s one of the few jobs you could have where no matter what sort of day you’ve had, you can always go home at night and feel good about yourself because you’ve done something good for people. It just gives me a warm feeling,” he enthuses.

He goes on to say that patients have become far more aware of what they want from their healthcare service and that patient choice has indeed become a very important part of government and NHS targets. Mike says that 80 percent of people would rather be treated in their own homes and, as such, companies like Healthcare at Home can alleviate the pressures on the NHS and their overstretched services.

“I think they struggle with the demands of society,” he adds. “We’re all getting older, we’re all living longer and demands on the healthcare system are continuing to grow - and everybody is struggling with the funding you need to provide services.”

Working with the NHS

With a range of treatments available from Plymouth to Elgin in Scotland, as well as “a very successful programme in Northern Ireland”, Healthcare at Home has certainly helped people to receive treatment in a way that suits them.

“We’ve actually got 24 [locations]. There are 17 what I would call ‘operational locations’ for nurses who work in the home environment, but they’re supported by administration officers and we’ve also got some logistics centres for distributing medicines to patients,” Mike explains. Just over 700 people work for Healthcare at Home at present, and Mike says that over 300 of these are medically trained, from nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and technicians.

“We run a rota system so there’s always a nurse on-call in any of the offices, and they have on-call pharmacists and logistics personnel in case the nurse needs any back up or support,” he says, believing that this really helps Healthcare at Home to offer a local and convenient service for patients.

“What we’re finding is that increasingly patients want to live as normal a life as possible - they want treatment in the evening, treatment at weekends and we’re just trying to respond to those requirements,” Mike says. The ability to contribute to society and maintain a normal lifestyle is as important to the patient as Healthcare at Home.

“I think what we try and do is take a broader view of the patients’ lives as a result of treatment; it’s not about whether it costs £5 to treat them or £500, it’s about their quality of life and the contribution that they can make to society,” he adds.

Additional services

In addition, Healthcare at Home can run clinics for the NHS, while it also delivers in the region of 500,000 prescriptions to patient homes each year, making it the largest company of its kind. Other distribution companies do not deliver to this number of patients, nor do they have the dedicated staff of Healthcare at Home.

“You need properly trained drivers, who understand the needs of the patients they’re delivering to. You need to know what you’re facing when you open the door,” Mike explains. “Some of the patients are chronically ill; they have good days and bad days and you need drivers that can cope with that. We’ve got some patients that are a little bit hard of hearing, or forgetful, and the drivers need to know that so they can persevere with making their delivery.”

In order to ensure that the whole system works as efficiently as possible, both medical professionals and delivery drivers are equipped with GPS tracking systems so that Healthcare at Home can identify if there will be any problems with meeting an arranged time.

And indeed the quality of the services provided by Healthcare at Home meets the standards set by the British Standards Institute. As a pioneer of medical services in patient homes, the company has worked hard to establish a new set of standards for general healthcare providers. The company now holds ISO 9001:2000, which it helped to develop in collaboration with the British Standards Institute and the Department of Health, in order to identify how to evaluate the provision of services.

Organic growth

With all of these changes, the company has expanded significantly. “In fact,” Mike says, “this year we will have been in the Fast Track 100 five times.” He explains that the company is the only one to have featured in the list so many times; Charles Walsh was presented with a special award for achieving such levels of growth.

The majority of this growth occurred with the provision of new services and the introduction of new drugs to the market. Having started with chemotherapy patients, Healthcare at Home is now able to offer services for a range of conditions and going forward it is looking to start offering services for chronic heart disease.

“I think we will continue to be entrepreneurial and innovative and moving into new services is the way forward for us. There’s always new treatment regimes coming out, new ways of treating patients, new drugs coming through, so it is an innovative area in which to work in any case,” Mike says.

For the future, Mike Gordon explains that there will be a number of changes made to healthcare. “I think that the NHS is actively trying to promote treatment closer to home and patient choice and I think in future we’ll find ourselves increasingly working with general practitioners and primary care trusts in addition to hospitals. I think that care is moving towards a more integrated service where the distinction between hospital and the community is greyer than ever.

“Hospitals will start providing outreach services, GPs and PCTs will start providing admission prevention services and this will require primary and secondary care providers to work very closely together - and that will create opportunities for companies like ours.”

Click here to view the corporate brochure on Healthcare at Home