Stephen Geach, The now sole owner of Cornelia Care Homes, grew up in a family business running care homes and spent time in his younger days helping in the homes and taking residents out at weekends. After a spell in the Royal Navy, he rejoined the family business in 1995. His love of the care home business and the opportunity to give the elderly real quality of life gave him the inspiration to break away from the family business and set up Cornelia Care Homes in 1998 to deliver his own style high quality residential care and nursing.The first home, Cornelia House, was purchased in 1998 and plans were immediately drawn up to improve and expand the home to make it into a well appointed and highly desirable residence. In 2000 Stephen was joined by Bryn Jones, who Stephen had met whilst in the Navy. Like Stephen, Bryn shared in the vision of improving the standards of care for the elderly residents in Cornelia's homes.
Their ethos is simple and whilst may appear trite is absolutely truthful - and is used by both Stephen and Bryn in the welcome speech at each home.
"We relate our residents to our own mothers. When we refurbish a home we think, would we want our mums to live here? If we can see them here then we know that we have succeeded."
The Cornelia Standard
After the success of Cornelia House, Stephen and Bryn were soon looking for more underinvested homes to acquire, expand and improve to bring them up to the 'Cornelia Standard', which has been further developed over the last few years. Nowadays the common elements of the Cornelia Standard include:
As well as the 10 point Cornelia Standard, Stephen and Bryn also believe in promoting other values through all personnel including: teamwork, a motivated environment, shared responsibility, everyday compassion, respect and dignity towards the residents, families and friends and a true social responsibility to all.
As part of this ethos they decided to address the issues of inconsistency of agency staff and training for care home assistants by implementing their own independent agencies. Cornelia's 'Platinum Care Solutions', their own staffing agency, provides a stability of staff to cover holidays, sickness etc - and 'Platinum Training Solutions', provides high quality training to all new staff as well as refresher and update courses for existing personnel. In fact they believe that training is so important that they invest around 6% of their turnover to staff training alone to ensure that the standard of care remains at a consistently high level.
The Cornelia Vision
Since 1998, Cornelia has grown from just one home to Eleven care homes in its portfolio, in locations stretching from Worthing to Southampton and up to their latest acquisition 'Camelot' in Amesbury. Stephen says: "Since setting up Cornelia in 1998 we have worked hard to improve the quality of care and surroundings at every home that we acquire - to enhance the lifestyle of our residents and those that work for us. With each subsequent acquisition this vision has seen us continually strive for excellence.
"These are words echoed by Bryn: "Our objective is to provide at least 500 beds in surroundings that will improve the quality of life for our residents and their families. Our ongoing enlargement, refurbishment and investment programmes will provide for all kinds of care - including those with a heavy reliance on round-the-clock nursing, such as EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm)".
Recently Stephen and Bryn undertook a multi-million pound refinancing project which gives them the opportunity to further upgrade and develop their existing care homes and invest in new and exciting projects. This includes a move from their current office suite at Cornelia House to Bridge House in Wickham, which offers period office accommodation reflecting their ethos for sensitive use of space.
So what of the future? Both Stephen and Bryn have the same vision 'Cornelia Village', a secure village environment that would provide a range of care with a mix of sheltered accommodation, care homes - some with specialist nursing - as well as retail units. This vision may just be on the drawing board at the moment, but with the passion, dedication and sheer determination of Stephen and Bryn this might just happen sooner rather than later. Watch this space.
