Our Values At Access For Care

What are your primary values that underpin your mission to care for local people with people from the local community?
Obi Madunagu, Registered Manager, Access For Care:

I'd say number one for me is integrity. Number two is empathy. Number three is responsiveness. And then number four is teamwork, those are our key values. All good things.

How do you deliver on that promise for people in your care?

In order to deliver these values, first and foremost, we prioritise getting in the right people who will support me as the Registered Manager to achieve our mission.

We have been very careful about this because resourcing is quite expensive. You just have to understand how to strike the right balance of recruitment against cash flow requirements for the business. So, number one, we select people carefully. For example, Great, my IT Manager.

Great joined us as an intern from his university Master's programme. At the end of his internship, we retained him. And he's not the only one here who has progressed from intern to permanent staff.

Secondly, we make sure we've got the right processes in place, run by the right people. We have the right people, and we have the right processes.

Thirdly, we have the right technology. We've invested a significant amount of money into automating our processes. It has not been an easy journey, but we are definitely not where we used to be five years ago when this company started. So again, it's getting the right people, getting the right processes, getting the right systems.

Then, fourthly, having the right governance in place is critical because I believe that in healthcare the key thing that make it thrive and continue to do well for a long time is the right governance. It's not about the money, it's not about the cash flow; for me, it's all about the governance. If you've got your governance wrong then, one day, everything will just come crashing down on you. So, for me, I take governance very, very seriously. There are measures we have put in place to make sure that we have the best sort of governance possible.

I come from a project management background, working for banks in the City of London and working on projects that had portfolio sizes in the tens of millions of pounds. I did a project that involved moving data that was worth £1.3 billion; I was responsible for big ticket transactions like that so governance and compliance so very important to me. I’m a member of the International Compliance Association as well, so, with most of the things I do, you can see compliance all through them.

These are the things that we have put in place and in order to get us to where we are now. Other companies that started when we did are no longer in existence. Some of them ran out of contracts, ran out of work, but we continue to make progress. We have built a very good relationship with our major client because they know that we have built the company on very solid foundations. Right from the very first day that we signed the contract with them in November 2019 it has been a good relationship.

I said, "We want to have an inch-wide, mile-deep relationship with them, and our clients." So, inch-wide: we want to make sure that our relationship is tight. Mile deep: we want to make sure that we know them very well and they know us very well too. There’s a lot of trust.

I know that when people from the community turn to Access For Care they are making the right choice.