Celebrating People-centered Success

Despite a year of COVID-related turbulence and continued uncertainty, Leaf Care’s commitment to our people and the services that we provide has been recognised, celebrated, and rewarded by some of the most influential organisations across East Anglia.

After receiving a rating of Good by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2019, we were delighted to further grow our reputation in 2020 by reaching the semi-finals of the Norfolk Business Awards—an event orchestrated by the Eastern Daily Press. The award acknowledges strength within our business community and celebrates and rewards business excellence.

Leaf’s entry was under the category of Employer of the Year, where we evidenced the care and compassion we hold for our employees, our adaptability over the year and through the pandemic, and how we encourage innovation through our people.

The feedback that we received from the judges was heart-warming:

‘We were hugely impressed with the incredible steps taken by Leaf Care to protect patients and staff in response to the COVID pandemic. It is clear that the leadership stepped up with great foresight and energy to do everything in their gift to make safety their primary focus and priority, and they should be rightly proud that they have had no cases of COVID-19 in their homes—this is clearly no happy accident. They have shown committed, passionate, and flexible leadership and have adapted impressively to the huge challenges they have faced as a result of the pandemic. They showed great adaptability by creating in-home living for staff, changing shift rostering, moving training and recruitment online and increasing staff communications (including creating a staff Instagram account), doing PPE drops in the field, and encouraging and training staff to take on nursing tasks caused by the loss of nursing provision to care homes. They can be rightly proud of their achievements as a business and a care provider’.

Our care and compassion towards our people, both internal and external, along with our solution-orientated adaptability through this epidemic, make us proud employers.

It has been recognised that we have enhanced lives through collaboration and by considering, adapting, and repurposing the way we work. Our future decisions and actions will continue to place people and our community at the heart of our operation.

Following our achievement with the Norfolk Business Awards, Leaf Care was thrilled to learn in November 2020 that we had been awarded a grant from the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership. Founded in 2010, the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership collaborates with businesses and local authority partners to drive growth and enterprise in Norfolk and Suffolk. They work to secure public and private investment to deliver various programmes and initiatives with partners to improve infrastructure, learning, and business development.

The awarded grant will assist us in further developing our non-institutionalised-lifestyle model of dementia care, and we have plans to add a kitchen-diner to our care home for a further eight residents.  The kitchen-diner will work in harmony with our in-house values and guiding beliefs that people with dementia, like any other, should have access to good nutrition, enjoyed through kitchen-based socialisation where the smells of home-cooked food stimulate the senses.

*This business expansion has been supported by New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership through the Business Resilience and Recovery Grant Scheme. We reserve the right to approve, in advance, any publicity or other material to be released to the media in connection with your grant award. We also reserve the right, on behalf of New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, to refer to any individual business’ growth plan and the funding offered in any of their publicity material.

We, like many, are looking ahead to next year. We are already planning how we can continue our success into 2021, with people, their wellbeing, and safety at the core of any new growth. We couldn’t have come this far without the many dedicated teams that we have behind us, and for that, we will be eternally grateful.