NES - A 10 Year Journey
This is a guest blog by NES Healthcare.
NES Healthcare is a fine example of how a company needs to explore the limits of its comfort zone in order to develop and to prosper.
Until about 10 years ago, NES was a successful organisation working within a well-established but still comparatively niche sector; the provision of managed doctor services for independent sector surgical facilities.
These are private hospitals where doctors work at Resident Doctors (RDs), primarily dealing with patients pre- and post-surgery. Our clients included (and still include) some of the most notable names in the industry, such as Nuffield Health, Spire Healthcare and BMI Hospitals (now Circle Health Group).
In 2015, our Managing Director, Peter Sheppard, challenged the team to achieve a level of diversification that would enable to organisation to break out of the confines of our core business model.
This has resulted in exceptional growth that has been built on our strengths – our reputation for providing high-quality medical services in a reliable and cost-effective fashion – but has reached into new sectors and specialties.
The journey has not always been straightforward and our team has had to learn a great deal about service provision outside that with which they were familiar.
One such example is the work we are now doing in the NHS. The problem of expensive locums filling the ever-increasing gaps in doctor rotas is nothing new, but it was very rare for the NHS to engage with providers such as NES to look at innovative solutions.
Our work with the East Kent University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has changed all of that. For the first time a forward-thinking Trust realised the potential that a managed service could offer, and this resulted in a large scale deployment of doctors across multiple specialties, saving them millions of pounds every year in locum fees.
For the first time, NES was able to offer its doctors not only the opportunity to work within NHS hospitals, but to specialise in medicine or trauma and orthopaedics.
We also opened up a further new speciality within the independent sector when we won the contract to provide doctors within the Priory Group. As a result of this we have developed a pipeline of psychiatric doctors, which is one of the most in-demand specialties in the UK.
From being a successful business in the provision of surgical doctors 10 years ago, NES has spread its wings into other sectors and specialties, all the while maintaining (and enhancing) its reputation for quality, continuity and excellence.
We now work with over 250 hospitals and clinics up and down the country and employ over 600 full-time doctors, delivering high-quality care to thousands of patients every day. We have a client portfolio that surpasses what we would have considered possible 10 years ago, but we still believe we can do a great deal more.
There is still a huge over-reliance in the NHS on expensive locum cover and we would like to offer more Trusts the opportunity to benefit from our experience and expertise thereby helping the Government to achieve better outcomes for patients as a result of continuity of care, reduced waiting lists and improved well-being of NHS staff.
