business | leader’s spotlight
A greener care choice Chief executive Joanne Balmer says all-inclusive fees and a sustainability model are key to helping Oakland Care stand out from crowd in the Southeast luxury care home market
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almer started working in care homes as a care assistant at the age of 16. “I always wanted to be a nurse, even when I was a toddler,” Balmer says. “My mum has pictures of me always wearing nurse outfits. I never really wanted to do anything different.” Having started as a volunteer in care homes and hospitals, Balmer worked in healthcare for 10 years as a qualified nurse before going into social care and focusing on quality improvement in 2010. She then joined Gracewell Healthcare and also later transitioned to work with Sunrise Senior Living as part of its acquisition by HCN, which became known as Welltower. After spending six years with Sunrise and Gracewell focusing on care quality and operations, Balmer was approached to join Oakland in 2019. “Sunrise and Gracewell had a fairsized portfolio of nearly 50 homes throughout England and had a corporate structure because there was also the US part of the company which had an involvement in how the group operated,” Balmer explains. “I was able to really influence and drive growth and also to be able to foster innovation within a small business because we were able to make decisions a lot quicker and we were able to be quite agile and well connected to our people.”
“What I was really attracted to at Oakland was the ability to come into an organisation which at the time was very small with only three open homes when I joined. I was able to really influence and drive growth and also to be able to foster innovation within a small
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business because we were able to make decisions a lot quicker and we were able to be quite agile and well connected to our people. “I have got to know, as you would expect, all our home managers, deputies and the heads of departments as well as quite a lot of our carers. “There comes a point when you have a certain size portfolio that you lose that personal touch. Oakland gave me a real opportunity to have that, but still have a real quality focus while also realising that ability to grow and innovate within social care.” Since Balmer joined, Oakland has grown to eight operational care homes providing residential, dementia, nursing and respite care in Essex, Kent, East Sussex and Oxfordshire with five having opening in the last three years. A further two homes are midconstruction, with Oakland having a pipeline of a further three identified sites. “That will complete our shortterm growth plans under our current ownership,” Balmer says. “As long as you have a good structure to really manage the business, it really is a case of making sure you remain in touch with the people which is fundamentally important for success.” Having worked her way up the career leader from care assistant to chief executive, Balmer is a shining example of how care can offer a career pathway. “That’s definitely something that we focus on quite a lot in Oakland,” Balmer says. “We have a talent management strategy and we are constantly appraising where our people are in terms of their performance and where their opportunities are, so we can look to build people’s careers with us as we grow the portfolio. We have got people who have been with us for years, who have grown from unit manager roles into managers, carers and deputy managers. We have got a head chef who has now moved into a role where he is
Joanne Balmer
head of hospitality and lifestyles. This was someone who was solely a chef and had never dreamt of doing anything with activities. He has now been able to develop into that extended role.” Oakland has developed homes in geographic clusters to help offer opportunities for staff to work across three or four homes. “Having smaller clusters enables people to grow into roles and that allows them to take smaller steps to moving into regional roles,” Balmer explains. “We always develop in areas where there is a noted undersupply in the market. We also look ahead so that even where you have a geographic location that may have only a very small undersupply, if a lot of the neighbouring stock is quite old and there’s not a supply of high-quality wetroom provision for example, we know that within five or ten years a proportion of that stock will no longer be operating and the local people will
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