East Anglian care provider, Kingsley Healthcare has embarked on a £200m-plus expansion strategy to become a familiar national brand within five years.
The group is planning to expand its chain of dementia care homes with five new sites a year, and will relocate to a larger headquarters in Lowestoft this year. The number of staff is predicted to increase to 3,500 within four to five years.
Kingsley Healthcare launched in 1999 with a single care home near the Suffolk coast. The company has since not only established a total of 23 care homes across the UK, but also developed specialisms in the fields of dementia and learning disabilities.
The Group’s founder and CEO Daya Thayan (pictured) worked in the hotel business for 15 years before identifying a niche in the care industry for homes that were more like hotels or residents’ own homes.
He said, “I was able to tap into parts of the hospitality experience and change the way the care homes worked,” says Daya. “In a care home, people have breakfast at a particular time, and will do activities at a particular time. In hotels you don’t do that. You can choose what you want to do and that flexibility was brought into Kingsley Healthcare.”