Venus Group UK is a proudly independent group of companies which is making a significant impact in the UK specialist healthcare industry. Having been active in the field since 2004 through its subsidiary Venus Healthcare, the group is gaining traction in the complex healthcare arena around autism and learning difficulties in Great Britain. With that momentum behind it, Venus Healthcare is now looking to take its provision beyond the UK.
From the day Venus Healthcare opened its first home in the UK, it has prided itself on adopting a progressive approach to care. By always working collaboratively and in partnership with all stakeholders, it has built a reputation of trust for the quality and safety of care it provides.
Venus Group director, Sri Nadarajah, tells The Leaders Council: “What makes Venus Healthcare different is that we build to meet care needs. We do not offer a product speculatively and neither do we provide a product as a one-size-fits-all panacea. Our aim is to deliver meaningful outcomes by providing high-quality care that can rehabilitate individuals with autism and learning difficulties, help them develop life skills, lead more independent lives, provide small-scale employment opportunities to develop more practical skills and enhance employment prospects.
“Of course, we cannot always take a high-intensity patient and bring them to the verge of employability and total independence, but at minimum, we will bring those that need the utmost amount of care to a point of medium intensity.
“We are committed to upholding the rights of every individual to enable them to make the choices they want and exercise their own freedom for self-determination. We use assisted technology to plan and create remarkable journeys for each person, embracing every opportunity to give expression about the person they are, respect their dignity and improve their self-esteem.”
Following the reforms outlined in the government’s Health & Care Act which went to Royal Assent earlier in 2022, Venus Healthcare has become a strategic partner to North West London’s newly formed Integrated Care Board. As part of this strategic partnership, Venus Healthcare has been working with the NHS to tackle the issue of bed blocking, a problem which has seen thousands of patients needlessly occupy hospital beds for longer than necessary because of a lack of capacity within the social care sector, which puts the NHS resources under additional strain.
Nadarajah explains: “Our ambition is to deliver better outcomes. We have an in-reach team who provide domiciliary care services to people in their own homes, while our outreach team goes into hospitals and looks to speed up the process of getting patients discharged into our care settings to prevent long-term bed blocking.
“The NHS have been proactively working with us on this and are keen to get patients out of long-term hospital care and into Venus Healthcare settings where we can work with these patients to aid their rehabilitation.”
To provide further healthcare services that meet the needs of communities, Venus Healthcare is eyeing up a 2023 target of launching a new community care village, which is to be based in the Berkshire village of Horton just four miles from Heathrow Airport.
“Our care village set to launch in 2023 will be the next step we take in providing real value for all,” Nadarajah says.
“For the many problems the construction industry is experiencing in supply chain and costs, we’re able to utilise our relationships with suppliers abroad through the construction arm of the Venus Group to procure materials more cost-effectively, leveraging our business relationships to make real differences and deliver projects such as the community care village at pace.”
Having made a significant positive impact in the UK care system, Venus Healthcare is currently collaborating with a large non-profit organisation on a knowledge and skills transfer partnership. This partnership will bring about the delivery of a, first of its kind, autism and learning difficulties complex care village in Malaysia, based on the model deployed in the UK.
To help realise its vision, Venus Healthcare has also sought to incorporate the input of its strategic Positive Behaviour Support [PBS] Director; Dr Jason Crabtree, a University College London academic who developed the framework for the National Autistic Society in the UK. His research interests focus on self-perceptions and self-esteem in people with learning disabilities. Venus Healthcare is unique in the UK as being the only care provider to boast of having such a director in this specialist role.
Nadarajah highlights: “Working with Dr Crabtree, we want to create a pathway to begin training new carers within Venus Healthcare settings. This will involve forming a degree-level programme where aspiring Malaysian care staff can come to the UK to learn. They will be working in our settings including the new community care village, in doing so they will gain the requisite skills to return to Malaysia and run the new care village unit that we will open there.
“We want to get this service off the ground to bolster the Malaysian public sector and strengthen care provision there. We envision that this whole pathway will ultimately take the form of a PBS Academy, which will help promote Venus Healthcare’s values and ensure that this knowledge and skills transfer partnership can truly thrive. From this, both the UK and Malaysia will see benefits.”
Indeed, Nadarajah hopes that by enabling aspiring Malaysian carers to come to the UK and upskill, they will not only be helping care receivers in the UK during their training, but also take back with them the necessary competencies to bolster the care offering in Malaysia for people living with autism and learning disabilities.
“In forming such a learning pathway and a thriving partnership we can create real value in both countries. Venus Healthcare’s speciality is in creating value in everything we do. We are not about cheap solutions that focus on short-term fixes, but instead we pride ourselves on creating value for money solutions that focus on ensuring long-term value.
“The bottom line is that this won’t just be creating value long-term in the UK and Malaysia, but it will be benefiting society on both sides and raising standards of care for those with autism and learning difficulties across the board.
“At a time where there is the prospect of further investment coming into Venus Healthcare and we have another community care village on the way in Indonesia that provides the first of its kind, holistic residential care for the elderly and respite care for sponsored residents, all of this is incredibly exciting for us. We most certainly look forward to re-shaping the healthcare services landscape, especially in Asia.”
Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash
