Our Story

We partner with the NHS and local authorities to deliver publicly funded health and care services the Virgin way, so that we can invest in the communities we serve, make a positive difference to people’s lives and help secure publicly funded health and care for the future.

Virgin Group has been investing in our partnerships with the NHS and local authorities since 2010, and since then the Virgin Group has invested £40m (and growing) in improving the quality of patient care and efficiency, allowing the NHS to serve more people and reduce reliance on hospital visits.

We’ve never generated a profit overall, and Sir Richard Branson has committed to re-investing any profit he could take out of the business in the future (over and above his investments) back into NHS and local authority services.

Investing back into the communities we serve

Since 2012, Virgin Group has invested £40m into our partnerships with NHS and Local Authority commissioners and every penny, plus the money we’re paid by the commissioners, is invested in delivering high quality services – and delivering transformation to secure it for the future. Find out more about our work across England and what we’ve delivered in our case studies.

Spending more time with patients, not computers

We’ve invested more than £5m in mobile working – one of the first NHS providers to do so – freeing nurses and clinicians from desks so that they can spend more time with the people who rely on them. This has resulted in a monumental improvement in the accessibility of vital information for our many colleagues who travel across the nation. Across one particular community nursing service in the South East, our mobile working investment resulted in around a 30% increase in patient contact time.

Keeping people out of hospital, with co-ordinated care

We’ve spent more than £4m on developing and introducing care co-ordination centres with each having a huge impact on its community and on people’s lives. In one of our centres in the Midlands, we’re saving around 10 people a week from being admitted to hospital through our care co-ordination centre making it easier and faster to access support. We’ve currently got centres in North Kent, Bath and North East Somerset, West Lancashire and East Staffordshire.

We focus on those areas where we believe we can make a difference, using innovative technology and investing in new models, we deliver improvements and innovations to community and primary care services all across England.

More than a decade into our journey, we’re led by Dr Vivienne McVey, a GP who co-founded the business back in 2006 and her Executive Team colleagues. Prior to starting up Virgin Care, Vivienne had been working as part of her local PCT, and when she was practicing as a GP in London and Beaconsfield, to bring care closer to people’s homes and to help keep people who didn’t need to be in hospital stay living independently for longer.

We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach, instead we tailor our services to each of the areas we work, partnering with commissioners, colleagues and local people to deliver a unique service, based around the needs of local people. We have a common approach for delivering the very best service we can for the local community, and it’s based on our values and our priority to provide care good enough for our own families.

Care co-ordination

We developed and launched the Care Coordination Centre model which is helping keep people healthy, happy and at home. Our innovative technology, bringing together records from the whole health service, is allowing our Care Navigators to empower patients to look after their own health, stay well and reduce pressure on hospital services.

Building a service without walls

We’ve joined up health and social care in Bath and North East Somerset, delivering a ‘service without walls’ for children and families in Essex, investing in new technology to improve community care for adults in West Lancashire and continuing our work on the Improving Lives project in East Staffordshire as well as having created and delivered a consistent, equitable Children’s Community Service in Wiltshire.

We have been in partnership with the NHS and with local authorities since 2010. Here’s our story:

An infographic showing the story of Virgin Care's growth since 2010

Two male physiotherapists sit on a table discussing patient notes

Health and care achievements across Virgin Care celebrated

October 17, 2018

Virgin Care has published its achievements made over 2017/18 across all its community services the organisation runs on behalf of the NHS and local councils, following publication of its Quality Account.

Featured Blog

A new way of working for Wiltshire’s Health Visitors

March 31, 2019

Jacqui manages seven large teams of health visitors across the county and has recently transformed the way colleagues work with the implementation of mobile working

A Virgin Care nurse speaking with a patient in her hospital bed at Farnham Hospital

Featured Case Study

Providing safe, high quality care to all who use our services

October 10, 2018

How Virgin Care demonstrates excellent accountability, decision making, systems and processes.

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