Festive focus: Bdaily chats with Local Care Force founder Leanne Silverwood

It’s that time of year again. The Christmas rush. The manic high-street shopping. The alarming convenience of one-click online purchases. The nail-biting potential for drama at the staff party.

All that aside, December’s a time when we’re able to reflect on our achievements and failures of the last 12 months, and look ahead with a bit more foresight and wisdom than we had this time last year.

The Festive Focus series we’re running this month will look to highlight all that and more. Throughout each week in December, we’ll be sharing insights from key businesspeople in the North East, Yorkshire & Humber and London.

Today we have Leanne Silverwood of Local Care Force.

Can you introduce yourself and your business to our readers?

“I am Leanne Silverwood, founder of Local Care Force, a nursing, social and healthcare agency with offices in Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. I have a team I am proud to work with and together we have built a highly successful, ethical, well respected and values driven agency and specialist training business.

“We have high standards and our recruitment and compliance processes are very strict, which at times can be an impediment to supply and demand, but our audits are near perfect and our client retention reflects this!

“We go above and beyond and spare no expense to deliver face to face training, which is far above the minimum requirement. Despite having a huge volume of staff and transient workforce our safety figures are impressively low and unheard of. I am incredibly proud of our business, my team and our strong values.

“It is because of them that we have created a consistency and sustainability which has supported our growth over the last 14 years to a peak of almost £20m turnover this year.”

What was your company’s biggest achievement of the year?

“This year I have been nominated for ‘Business Woman of the Year’ in the £10-£25m turnover category and ‘Employer Of The Year’ at the National Business Women’s Awards. If I win, this will definitely be both my biggest personal achievement of the year and also the businesses too!

“The business has grown organically this year and in addition, I am incredibly proud of the vast number of contracts my team have secured, which include Nuffield and Spire private hospitals.

“On the back of being Shortlisted for three Nursing Specific Awards, in three categories for two separate projects we were inducted into the Royal Collage of Nursing library of best practice as the gold standard for agency Nursing.

“LCF is the first and only agency to have ever been inducted and the success of our projects ‘Agency Nurses protect yourself, protect your patients’ & ‘Address your stress’ were truly an achievement in the field of Nursing and employee well being.”

How would you approach 2018 differently, given the chance?

“I would work less. I am all about work life balance for the team. We employ 24-hour cover for our phones to ensure our team don’t have to work out of hours, and strongly encourage going home on time. But I really should take my own advice. Life is short and should be enjoyed in balance.”

What are your company’s plans for the new year?

“We are currently testing an entirely new IT system which includes a new bespoke database. When we roll it out in the new year, it will save our team so much time. We have incorporated some top secret innovative features too which will make a huge difference to the business overall.

“Other big news is our clinical trainer who is a former Manchester University nursing dept lecturer, will join us full time in 2019 to further develop our workforce. She is a very exciting and prestigious recruit for us.

“But otherwise we will remain consistent in our approach and supply of service, we avoid any hair brain tactics and our plans are to do as we have done for the last 14 years. We do like to innovate in areas, but our quality service and client/worker retention is near impeccable because our consistency is what our clients and workers can rely upon.”

What’s your favourite Christmas song?

“I love Elvis, so it’s got to be Blue Christmas. But all Christmas songs are welcome in our house/office!”

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