23rd May 2025

Your Healthcare and the social enterprise model praised in Sir Ed Davey’s new book

Sir Ed Davey, MP for Kingston and Surbiton and leader of the Liberal Democrats, published his book ‘Why I Care – and why care matters,’ on May 22 and praises both Your Healthcare and the social enterprise model of delivering health and social care. In the book, Sir Ed describes Your Healthcare’s outcomes as ‘exemplary’ and concludes: “For me, Your Healthcare is a model of how we should reform the state’s role in health and care services – by being locally focused”.

Sir Ed comments include:

“Your Healthcare is an organisation that is even more rare than our local charities and voluntary groups. Formerly part of NHS Kingston, Your Healthcare was created as a mutual, cooperative social enterprise on 1st August 2010, to deliver healthcare services to the local community as part of the NHS family – with my active support.

“As a not-for-profit social enterprise, it delivers patient-led, high-quality health and social care community services for people in Kingston. Its community interest company status allows it to invest any surplus or profit back into frontline services, where it is needed most by the community. While it remains part of the NHS family, delivers care under the same ethos and has staff who enjoy the same (or better) terms and conditions – including NHS pensions – it behaves very differently from your normal NHS organisation. 

“To be clear, most of its professional staff have health qualifications, but as almost every primary healthcare professional experiences, the line between primary healthcare delivered in the home and social care is blurred. From district nursing to health visitors and school nurses, from services like rehabilitation, rapid response, continence, respiratory, tissue viability and leg ulcer service, to physiotherapy, podiatry and speech and language provision, its main focus is community health. 

“But it does run social care community services from reablement – helping those recovering from illness or hospitalisation to regain independence, and home care, to the shared lives scheme, a highly personalised form of care intended to strike a happy medium between living at home and supported living or a care home – bringing the expert care of formal settings into a home environment. 

“For me, Your Healthcare is a model of how we should reform the state’s role in health and care services – by being locally focused. Its slight arms-length relationship with the NHS means it is able to look down into the community not up to the Department of Health and Social Care. It’s key performance indicators for everything from patient and staff satisfaction to health outcomes are exemplary and it has exceptionally low administration and non-frontline costs – so it can invest more into health and care. It seems more nimble and less bureaucratic than most parts of the NHS I’ve dealt with and I’d love to see more of this support.”

“Your Healthcare is not alone – and is part of a small movement that grew briefly in the final years of the last Labour government. Social Enterprise UK reports that around a third of all community health services are delivered by social enterprises, and health and social care social enterprises turn over £1.5 bn a year and employ over 100,000 staff. Unlike most of the rest of the NHS, it can’t go into deficit, so unusually for NHS-based organisations, it isn’t in an almost continual state of financial crisis, and regularly records a surplus for reinvestment. 

“Not only do social enterprises like Your Healthcare offer fresh thinking for the NHS, but it seems an obvious style of organisation to work with to ensure family carers aren’t forgotten in the NHS, and to partner with local authorities and local voluntary groups like Kingston Carers’ Network to build a deep community response both to family care more broadly and to those without family and friends able and willing to help.”