Care UK trio make Care Home Professional Power List 2021

Three of our senior management team have made it to the Care Home Professional Power List 2021, the authoritative list of who’s who in the care sector.

Andrew Knight, Chief Executive, has been recognised for his leadership during a transformative decade for Care UK. With Andrew at the helm we have maintained standards, increased levels of satisfaction, expanded via new builds and acquisition and invested in existing facilities.

 

Drawing on his years of expertise and his own experience of a relative living with Alzheimer’s, Andrew’s strategic leadership and passion for ensuring care home residents enjoy the very best life have sat at the heart of his transformative seven years with Care UK.

He has led one of the most ambitious development programmes in the care home sector, opening 53 state-of-the-art care homes with a further 18 in various phases of planning and construction. Six homes opening during the pandemic and during the last three years Andrew has overseen an investment of £6m in older homes. Under Andrew’s stewardship Care UK was chosen to be one of two providers to take over the leadership and management of Sunrise Senior Living UK and Gracewell Healthcare’s homes in the UK, adding 26 homes to our portfolio.

 

 He encourages the use of technology and innovation, including a partnership with the University of Worcester which underpins our approach for caring for those living with dementia. He ensures that standards of quality remain high, and as a consequence we have the highest number of CQC Outstanding-rated homes within our sector of the market. Satisfaction rates for our residents and their families increase year-on year.

Andrew is an advocate of recruiting the best people and nurturing our own home grown talent. To this end he has supported a number of initiatives to encourage continuing professional development and colleague retention. The results are impressive. Since January 2020 more than 100 home managers have enrolled in our Leading with Care programme and 88 team members have joined our Leadership Development programme. Of this first cohort, 36 per cent have been promoted with a retention rate of 85 per cent. Care UK’s sector-leading apprenticeship programme and its ground breaking chef academy have helped 750 team members progress their careers in the past year alone. The innovative Buddy programme has improved the organisation’s 90-day retention by 9 per cent year-on-year.

He is recognised as a leader within the sector and by government, and throughout the pandemic he has been at the forefront of interpreting government policy for implementation across our homes.

Chris Hopkinson, Operations Director – South, leads seven regional directors and several operational support managers. His commitment to quality has resulted in 83 per cent CQC compliance with six homes rated as Outstanding.

 

Chris came to social care with a background in retail and broad managerial and commercial expertise which has proved invaluable in his role with Care UK. His knowledge of social care is encyclopaedic and prior to the pandemic he spent many hours visiting his homes to gain the widest understanding of the needs of residents, their families, Care UK colleagues and professional partners.

With the South East and London especially hard hit by the pandemic, Chris has worked round the clock with a mixture of empathy, creativity and flexibility to ensure his teams remained motivated and that residents continued to enjoy the highest standards of care. By working closely with health partners in his region, Chris helped to reduce pressure on local hospitals while minimising the risk of Covid infection in the homes in his region.

All this while overseeing the opening of three new homes.

Geoff Edwards, Operations Director – North, oversees the other half of Care UK’s 125 homes, leading and inspiring eight regional directors and members of the leadership team.

 

Geoff has worked in social care throughout his career. His experience and policy for being highly visible throughout his area make him a highly respected director. Throughout the pandemic, when in-person visits were not allowed, Geoff made himself available 24/7 in order to support his team on a wide variety of issues from bereavement to pushing back when hospitals tried to send untested individuals into homes.

He has an unrelenting focus on the provision of quality care, with 12 homes rated as Outstanding by the CQC and 93 per cent rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ in the Scottish equivalent.

Around half of the 53 new homes opened by Care UK over the past eight years have been in Geoff’s area, and he has striven to ensure that talented and experienced professionals have been attracted to work in these state-of-the-art care environments.