Interview: James Tugendhat, CEO of HC-One
James Tughendhat, CEO at UK nursing home group HC-One, joined it in the eye of the Covid storm. As the UK wrestles with the largest healthcare workforce strike in recent history, he sat down with HBI to discuss the importance of investing in staff, and his group’s ongoing response to the staffing crisis.
Click here to read more about HC-One and here to read more about the UK nursing home sector in HBI Intelligence.
“I joined an organisation in crisis. Colleagues were in shock and torn between wanting to do the right thing for those in our care, and keeping their families safe. We were dealing with incredible losses and people grieving but not able to visit their loved ones. On top of that, we were in deep financial distress as a sector,” he tells HBI, noting that he joined pre-vaccination but around the time testing was being introduced.
At that time, he says the priorities were threefold – continuity of care, the safety of the workforce, and simply ensuring HC-One had the financial wherewithal to continue. Like other UK care homes, it began benefitting from government funding and used refinancing to increase staff wages, something he is proud of.
“Very quickly the mission became ‘how do we honour those who suffered through Covid and reward those who made the difference?’ We had made a condition of our recovery that we would invest in our frontline so we started ways to raise wages quite early pre-2021.
“So we were less impacted than some and when our occupancy started recovering, we were able to recruit. I’m proud that we took a workforce that was largely minimum wage (£9.50 to £10.42 an hour for over 23s) will now be at 80% foundation living wage (£10.90 outside London) when we do our next pay increase in the next few weeks.”
Challenges around staff recruitment and retention and turnover continue to worsen, however, with more people leaving care than ever before. He explains: “When you talk to colleagues, for them care is not a job, it’s not even a profession – actually, it’s a vocation. For colleagues on the front line, what matters most to them is what stops them doing good care. It’s the lack of investment in systems that help them. It’s when they feel understaffed. It’s when they feel over-pressured.
“It’s when the complexity and acuity of the needs of those who come into care is too great for them to feel trained and equipped to deal with. The big issue is that traditionally the government has not funded care to a level where it has been remotely viable to pay anything like the wages that the value and skill inherent in the role would suggest. Whether it’s underpaying nurses for 10 years, or providing insufficient funding for carers and seeing it as a poor relation to NHS work, this creates a problem.
“More people are leaving care than ever before and when you have an economy bouncing back and retail and hospitality trying to find people anywhere, you very quickly get into a workforce crisis. We were able to recruit but nonetheless, we’ve only been able to sustain the return of occupancy by having a lot of agency. Being able to train, develop, and reward our colleagues at a level means that we’ve got ever improving recruitment and retention. It’s been hard but we’ve seen improvements and retention going all the way back to last summer and we’ve been growing our workforce pretty sustainably – including counting all the leavers that you never invariably get.”
As for the future, he tells HBI: “We’ve been investing in refurbishing at least 200 of our homes and will eventually do them all. There’s long been lots of investment in largely privately funded care but we’ve really been the first in a long time to invest in making homes more fit for dementia in local authority care. That was really the mission – you’ll never succeed but we’re certainly a lot further.”
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Michaila Byrne or call 0207 183 3779.
