Bryson: Ready for the challenges
Northern Ireland’s largest social enterprise is preparing for the shift towards more care in the community.
Bryson Care, part of the Bryson Charitable Group, Northern Ireland’s leading social enterprise delivers a wide and innovative range of caring support. In the last year we provided over 223,700 hours of care and support to over 4,660 families, individuals and older people across Northern Ireland and in County Donegal.
Transforming your Care (TYC) is an exciting policy development and Bryson Care is well placed to support the priority of this policy – “delivering services that are local, responsive and person-centred with an emphasis on promoting independence and improving outcomes for older people”.
Collaboration
Liz Leathem, Assistant Director for Bryson Care Adult Services, highlights: “Bryson is very optimistic about the future, we are ready for growth and see TYC as an opportunity to develop and deliver ‘world-class’ services, driven by our recent Ireland Excellence Award to support older people to live at home and avoid unnecessarily entering residential care. The shift to reablement as a service priority is shaping our service design to ensure that people receive the right aids, adaptations and other supports at home in a timely manner.
“Bryson believes that the service delivery ‘landscape’ will change radically as TYC embeds with a greater need for collaborative working. This will be a great opportunity for locally based socially driven enterprises to scale up for delivering larger contracts. It will create new opportunities for innovation in supply chains and Bryson’s new development of a social franchise for service delivery is at the heart of our plans.”
Quality
Quality assurance and service excellence are key elements in the Bryson approach to the emerging TYC marketplace.
A broad range of our services including domiciliary care, home from hospital and reablement support, are subject to annual inspections by the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) and this year has resulted in excellent reports with full compliance.
Supporting Positive Ageing
Our attitude to ageing is changing and it’s now an important life-stage that with appropriate support can enable people to live rich and productive lives. Bryson believes strongly in promoting social inclusion and choice for older people and we are constantly being challenged to develop innovative ways of pursuing active and positive ageing.
The personalisation agenda has not been driven forward quickly enough but as it becomes more of a reality for older people in Northern Ireland, Bryson welcomes this as an opportunity to develop a range of services better matching the needs of service users. We believe that our social enterprise model will enable us to develop a new range of person-centred services commissioned directly by individuals from us. This empowers the user to take more control over their lives and make choices in how their support is delivered to best meet their particular needs, providing real choice.
Bryson Care and Bryson CareWest are key business units within the Bryson Charitable Group. The care services delivered include domiciliary care, home from hospital, home-based respite, laundry services, a befriending service through volunteering, neighbourly care, children and family support and social work practice learning centre.
At the heart of the Bryson Group is a commitment to excellence and this has been demonstrated through external accreditation including the Investor in People (IiP) Silver Award, UK Social Enterprise of the Year 2012 from the Private Business Awards, and the Queens Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development 2012.
For more information and a link to our short video, please see www.brysongroup.org
Follow our CEO on twitter @johnatbryson
