Amrit Dhaliwal, CEO of homecare franchise Walfinch
A care business offers the rare reward of making a living and benefitting society – but much as we like to polish our halos, we’re providing care in exchange for money.
It’s time care providers started shouting about this. Without a healthy level of income, we can’t supply healthy levels of high-quality care. Poor revenues mean poor pay for carers, poor levels of service and poor business returns.
Now it’s time to talk money
The whole care sector needs to be talking about money. We can’t just rely on governments to supply more funding – we must come up with plans ourselves.
The last big idea about reforming social care funding came in the Dilnot Commission report in 2011. It supplied a plan, it was controversial, and governments have consistently put off implementing it.
Media interviews with relatives desperate to get sick people into, or out of, hospital, may produce short-term injections of government cash, and while these are welcome, the fundamental problem of efficient long-term funding of the care sector remains.
Stories like these simply cast the care sector as a broken service – but it’s not.
We must fight the ‘broken’ image
Far from being broken, the care sector is a huge opportunity for building thriving businesses. The fundamentals are good: demand is massive. Over 542,000 people are waiting for care assessments, reviews, or for care to begin, the Association of Adult Social Care Services (ADASS) recently reported.
Future demand can only grow. If care was a share investment, savvy investors would be piling in.
The ‘broken sector’ image will deter entrepreneurs from coming in, put carers off joining our teams, and prevent clients from coming forward.
Clever homecare companies and franchisees can see the opportunity that care actually is. Certainly, here at Walfinch we can. That’s not to say homecare is a get-rich-quick business. We are not in it for the money, but those who persevere can make a steady and growing long-term income and provide quality care at the same time.
We want to provide the quality care that people deserve, but we need healthy incomes to enable us to do this.
Quality care and profit go hand in-hand
We need to help sort out the problems ourselves. That means collaborating to talk about money.
The first consideration should be increasing revenues. Big enough margins will allow everyone in the sector to pay carers a fair wage, take on more clients and expand their businesses.
Not enough care providers place revenue first, maybe because they feel uncomfortable talking about money – but a healthy level of income and quality of care go hand in hand.
Lessons from the franchise model
As a franchise with 26 offices across the country, working collaboratively comes naturally to Walfinch, and we talk together often about the importance of revenues and the relationship between healthy income and quality services.
We provide all of our franchisees with business models and systems that ensure they can run a profitable, growing business, which is the only way to maintain the high quality of care that we expect and our clients deserve.
The care sector as a whole can learn from this. Vicious competition between providers only serves to drive wedges between us, when what we need right now is a united front.
The homecare sector is in danger of becoming a two-tier system, where those that can afford decent care pay for it themselves, and those that can’t have to take local authority services that are poorly-funded. We have heard of authorities asking homecare suppliers to provide care for £6 an hour – clearly an uneconomic proposition.
A two-pronged strategy
On the one hand we could press for a national minimum rate for local authority work. Currently rates vary among local authorities, creating a post-code lottery.
The state sets minimum wages and local authorities need to be funded sufficiently well to allow us to pay them, and keep our businesses going.
Meanwhile care suppliers need to focus more stringently on revenue. Many homecare providers mix private, client-funded work, with state-funded work. If we charge a fair rate for private work – say, £23.20 an hour, as calculated by The Homecare Association as the minimum realistic price for homecare from April 2022 – then we may be able to offer 10%-15% discounted rates to local authorities.
Meanwhile efficient collection and analysis of data and use of technology will help everyone optimise revenues. At Walfinch we use these tools to show clearly what services, processes and procedures drive healthy revenues and the whole franchise benefits.
But all of us in the sector need to discuss how we achieve this, because if we don’t, both revenue and care quality will fall.
Image depicts Amrit Dhaliwal, CEO of homecare franchise Walfinch