Agency nursing and healthcare provider Local Care Force is celebrating 20 years in business. This is a major milestone for the specialist recruiter, which has weathered many storms, including the pandemic, changing governments, new legislation, the NHS in crisis, and an ageing population.
The company attributes this remarkable success to its incredible and dedicated staff. It has over 35 employees – more than half of whom have been with the business for over a decade, and 550 temporary staff. The business has offices in Leeds, Sheffield, and Manchester and supplies workers to the nursing, healthcare, and social care sectors.
Since its inception, Local Care Force has provided staff for over 1.5 million shifts and is the preferred partner to many large private, public, and charitable organisations. It has worked with private hospitals, including Priory, as a top-level supplier and has been a main supplier to HFT, a specialist learning disability provider, for the last 12 years.
In addition, Local Care Force is renowned for its outstanding compliance, being the first agency to achieve ‘Priory Elite’ scoring over 95% in multiple audits.
Leanne Silverwood, a former healthcare professional, founded Local Care Force two decades ago. Having originally worked in mental health care, Leanne saw that she could improve the industry by creating a genuinely caring agency that provided quality, trained, and well-supported staff.
The business has also successfully educated, supervised and introduced over 1,100 individuals to a career in care through its ‘Prepare to Care’ and ‘New to Care’ training courses, which are run by teachers, trainers, a care manager and qualified Nurses.
On the anniversary, Leanne Silverwood MD and Founder, commented. “We are so proud to have reached this major milestone of 20 years in business. We are industry specialists providing consistency and quality and we couldn’t have done it without our incredible team of dedicated, committed, and loyal workers. Over the years, we’ve learned many valuable lessons that have shaped our company into what it is today.
“As an agency, we pride ourselves on being small enough to care and to make every one of our clients feel important, whilst still being big enough with a strong enough infrastructure to weather the storm. The last four years have been an absolute roller coaster and navigating the pandemic was one of the biggest challenges we could have ever experienced. The fact that we are still here is a testament to the incredible hard work and dedication of every single member of our team.”
LCF has previously been awarded 21st place in the Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to work for and is the only agency to ever be inducted into the Royal Collage of Nursing library of best practice, as the gold standard for agency Nursing.
L-R (front row) Samantha Bates, Leanne Silverwood, Steph Dakers, Michelle Shaw, Wendy Silverwood (back row) Paul Jones, Wayne Brady, John Ibbotson