Newbury Business Today

Bluebird Care West Berkshire and Basingstoke - In business to care

14th February 2008

Email: richard.maynard@newburynews.co.uk

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John Prendergast and Phil Miles are the driving force behind one of Newbury's newest businesses, Bluebird Care West Berkshire and Basingstoke.

THE pharmaceutical industry seems an unlikely springboard for starting a homecare company, but John Prendergast and Phil Miles had worked together in that field some time before setting up Bluebird Care West Berkshire and Basingstoke.
Mr Miles explained: “This seemed to be an opportunity, because there is a huge demand, currently, for domiciliary or home care, which is increasing, for a couple of reasons. One is that the population is growing older, and West Berkshire is a great example of that.
“It’s a fairly rural part of the county. And there’s an amount of money, locally, with people living in big houses, and increasingly, people don’t want to leave their house and go into residential care.
“The market was right, and I had experience, personally”
Mr Miles had looked for care for his elderly parents, and found it hard to find where to look. “As somebody trying to find care in your own home services, how do you find out about them? I can honestly say that when we started looking, I didn't know they existed.”
What he found was that while it was possible to find people by word-of-mouth, it was not a satisfactory way of providing full-time care.
“That really opened my eyes in terms of how we now try to advertise our business and let people know that the service is available,” he said.
Bluebird Care West Berkshire and Basingstoke covers the whole of the West Berkshire and North Hampshire area, with a combined population of about 300,000 people. The national homecare market is estimated at about £12bn per year and is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the UK. The retired population is forecast to grow by 32 per cent over the next 35 years, with the over-85 population predicted to nearly double in the next 25 years. Pensioners are set to outnumber children for the first time.
“The other issue, which we touch on, and is an important part, is that an estimated 70,000 homes are sold each year to fund care costs,” said Mr Miles. “Residential care is blinking expensive, more expensive than having care in your own home.”
He continued: “In the old days, most care was delivered by social services, but increasingly, people are paying for their own care.”
Bluebird’s range of services covers everything from personal care visits of 15 minutes upwards, which could include getting clients out of bed and helping with meals, bathing or toileting, to sleep-in care and live-in 24-hour care.
According to John Prendergast, people should not be looking at minimun standards of care, but in quality of standards.
He said: “One of the greatest challenges of the next few years is how we look after out older people, and we at Bluebird use the measure of wanting the service to be of a level that we would offer to our own mothers and fathers.”
Bluebird is part of a franchised network, with each francisee licensed to operate in a particular area. Care for each client begins with an initial phone conversation, and then a detailed care assessment is produced, folowed by a care plan, in consultation with the client’s relatives. Each plan is unique.
Clearly, the care workers are an important element of the business, and are recuited carefully. “We have a focus on recuiting high-quality care workers,” said Mr Miles. “We have exacting standards.”
According to Mr Prendergast, more applicants are turned away than employed. “We have very clear criteria about the type of people we want to work for Bluebird Care,” he added. “We have high standards, which we demand of all our employees.
“We support all our care workers in achieving NVQs in social care, and we run that in-house ourselves, which is delivered by a nationally-accredited training provider. After six months, we expect everybody to be enrolled on an NVQ course, and we incentivise people with NVQs by paying them more.”
All staff are subject to CRB police checks, and the company is registered with the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) and is also accredited by West Berkshire Social Services and Hampshire Adult Services. All staff are recruited locally.
“Bluebird Care is all about finding a solution to our customers’ problems,” said Mr Miles. “It’s about speed of response, it's about someone on the other end of the phone having a positive and enthustiastic approach to help you, and an ability to deliver on what they require.”
So far, 10 care workers have been recruited, and the number is increasing all the time.
The company began trading from its offices in Kelvin Road, Newbury, in December, following an official opening by West Berkshire leader Graham Jones, and its growth since has been “meteoric”.
Mr Prengergast believes that it is economics, rather than worries about the standard of residential care, which is making home care more attractive. Bills of £50,000 per are simply making residential care unaffordable, he said.
“When people make the decision to get Bluebird care, our intention is not to take their independence away,” said Mr Prendergast.
“It’s actually to support them top remain independent. We don’t put care workers in there to do everything for them. It’s to enable them to live the other parts of their life as independently as possible.”
More information about the company is available at www.bluebirdcare.co.uk

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