Julia Darby is the director of NEDCare, a community-owned care provider in Mortonhampstead, Devon.
What do you do?
I’m Julia Darby and I am the executive director of NEDCare. On a day to day basis, I head up on business development. I work with communities and county-wide partners and I develop projects and services.
My background is charity management, fundraising and working with communities.
What is the point of the project?
Back in 2014, the beds were being closed in our local hospital in Moretonhampstead. This was a couple of years before other cottage hospitals in Devon lost their beds.
The hospital was a good staging home between acute hospital care and returning home for older people – our population is older than the average. The local authority was concerned because they knew there was no care at home in this rural area. There was only one or two people getting regulated care and the rest was informal.
So I approached Moretonhampstead Development Trust. We brought in a bit of funding to speak to the GPs and to find our what people’s experiences were and what they needed.
We were being told that this area is market failure for social care – so the local provider can’t find a provider to buy services from.
The reason for market failure is that we are very rural. Road access and transport is not good and the commercial, regulated agencies are in the towns surrounding the moor – just too far away. Even from the centre of the patch it can take 30 or 40 minutes to get to a remote customer.
We knew we needed to set up a regulated agency so everyone who needed care could get it where and when they needed it.
It meant that we had to establish a regulated care agency in order to work with the local authority clients, who are typically the worst off financially and the most in need. If we didn’t get regulated then we wouldn’t be able to help those people. But we also knew that would take a lot of time and money.
A bit more on our current project to help other communities and social enterprises.https://t.co/0Qw0IogxSC https://t.co/0Qw0IogxSC
— NE Dartmoor Care (@NEDCare) January 16, 2019
3. When was the moment you decided to do this?
I have been living in the area for 13 years and I was increasingly aware of a problem with social care.
I started doing self-employed care myself, when I wasn’t at my main job. I was thinking I should do something about it, but I was intimidated because social care was new to me and I knew it was complex, so I sat on the idea for about a year. That’s when the CCG started its consultation about closing the hospital beds.
When they said it would be ok because there is care at home for people, I got a bit riled up. It gave me the energy I needed to finally do something.
4. What’s been your proudest moment so far?
Achieving regulated status, I think. We are now a regulated agency employing our own care staff.
You have to make sure the service is safe, that it’s caring and well-led. As a regulated agency you can’t use a self-employed carers and there’s a whole host of work you have to do to maintain regulatory compliance.
Because we are community-owned, not for private profit, we said we wanted to see the best conditions for carers, and also the best quality care.
We give our staff great support and the best terms and conditions that we can. We give annual leave, pensions and we pay for travel time.
We’re working to create a different kind of agency that isn’t driven by the logistics but quality.
5. What’s been hardest?
Before we’d started fundraising, and it felt like an insane idea, that was hard.
I’d meet someone about it and they would say, you’re brave. But myself and the NEDCare board believed in it. We had to do a lot of research about how the business works.
We’re delivering 600 hours a month (as of January 2019) and we know we need to build it to 1800 a month to meet demand and to support overall business viability. But what’s scary now is whether we can find the people who want to work for us and do care work.
The role is so important but is traditionally undervalued.
It’s actually one of the most rewarding and important things you can do: directly improving the quality of life for individuals every day.
6. What drives you when it gets hard?
Knowing all the people that we’re helping. Recently, I was doing an audit of feedback that we get from clients and it can make me quite emotional – knowing we have had such an impact on people’s lives.
7. What’s the next step?
Being really creative about recruitment and finding new ways to reach good carers.
8. How did you vote in the EU referendum and why?
I didn’t vote. I thought about it a lot. I thought about voting on both sides. And in the end I didn’t vote because I didn’t feel I had enough information to make an informed decision. I thought I can’t trust anybody and I won’t be complicit in either outcome.
I think it happens a lot in politics. We have such fantastic institutions dedicated to finding evidence but when policy is made it’s almost entirely without evidence of what works.
9. How will the outcome affect what you do?
Recruitment is a concern. Across the UK we have an ageing population and if we can’t use migrant workforce, how are we going to recruit carers? I often hear that people in the UK don’t really want to work in care. It’s something I worry about.
We’re in a bubble here because we’re rural and close-knit, we haven’t got the bottom of attracting staff from the local population.
People are underemployed locally. Work tends to be seasonal, low-paid and low-skilled, whereas I see this career as high-skilled with career progression opportunities. It’s about how we get those messages across.
We’re not looking for a European workforce but if we can’t get bigger without it, it would be nice to have that option.
10. What would you say to someone looking to do something similar?
Go for it.
We are producing a toolkit to help communities to set up and run their own “carer introduction services”, which is how we started – introducing people needing care to self-employed carers. It is a useful step for anyone considering setting up an agency because you get to know the needs of local people and running introduction services helps to build support for the initiative. It can be a useful staging approach to building a regulated agency.
Speak to as many people as you can, go and chat to people, and find out how they feel about that area and the care that they can find and what their concerns are. You never know who you’re talking to and they might say: “I build websites,” or, “I ran a chain of carehomes, I can help.”
11. What does community mean to you?
Connections. I have an image in my head of an organic starfish shape. We’re more than the sum of our parts. If we can stay connected with each other and utilise our skills and interests and understandings then we have become a meaningful whole.
