Nestor Primecare Services Limited also known as Allied Healthcare was the UK's largest domiciliary care business and a leading provider of outsourced healthcare services to the English primary care sector.

History

Allied Healthcare started in 1972, with a nursing home in

Staffordshire Staffordshire (; postal abbreviation Staffs.) is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. It borders Cheshire to the northwest, Derbyshire and Leicestershire to the east, Warwickshire to the southeast, the West Midlands C ...

. It now has 140 branches across the UK and

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the s ...

. Allied Healthcare was acquired by

Saga group Saga is a British company focused on serving the needs of those aged 50 and over. It has 2.7 million customers. The company operates sites on the Kent and Sussex coast: Enbrook Park and Priory Square. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange. ...

in 2011. In December 2015, Saga agreed to sell Allied Healthcare to Aurelius Group, which describes themselves as a pan-European asset manager with offices in Munich, London, Stockholm, and Madrid. Nestor Primecare Services Ltd., registered in Stafford, is the legal entity behind the Allied Healthcare brand. It also provides

Out-of-hours service Out-of-hours services are the arrangements to provide access to healthcare at times when General Practitioner surgeries are closed; in the United Kingdom this is normally between 6.30pm and 8am, at weekends, at Bank Holidays and sometimes if the ...

s. On 21 April 2018, Allied Healthcare announced it would seek a

Company Voluntary Arrangement Under UK insolvency law an insolvent company can enter into a company voluntary arrangement (CVA). The CVA is a form of composition, similar to the personal IVA ( individual voluntary arrangement), where an insolvency procedure allows a compa ...

to protect itself from creditors due to a "highly challenging environment", through it would continue to operate without redundancies. In November 2018 the

Care Quality Commission The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom. It was established in 2009 to regulate and inspect health and social care services in England. I ...

issued a notice saying it had serious doubts about the future of the business and warned local authorities that they might have to intervene. The company said this was "premature and unwarranted" as they had secured further funding support. It subsequently announced it was exploring the sale or transition of services to alternative providers, including the transfer of staff. In December 2018 it was acquired by CRG a specialist healthcare recruitment agency, part of the Health Care Resourcing Group, based in

Prescot Prescot is a town and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside, England. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Lancashire, it lies about to the east of Liverpool city centre. At the 2001 Census, the c ...

. CRG took over all the existing care contracts, and they will continue under the Allied Healthcare brand. It terminated its contract for the

out-of-hours service Out-of-hours services are the arrangements to provide access to healthcare at times when General Practitioner surgeries are closed; in the United Kingdom this is normally between 6.30pm and 8am, at weekends, at Bank Holidays and sometimes if the ...

in Birmingham in November 2018. The service was taken over by the Badger GP-run out-of-hours and urgent care cooperative.

Legal action

In October 2014 Allied Healthcare, then owned by Saga, was ordered to pay the legal costs of Elaine Fernandez, a nurse who was awarded more than £80,000 by an employment tribunal in 2013. It ruled she was unfairly dismissed and suffered detriment for making protected

whistleblowing A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...

disclosures. The tribunal said the company had pursued a "defensive position" that was "unreasonably hostile". She had raised concerns after

Hywel Dda Health Board Hywel Dda University Health Board (HDUHB) ( cy, Bwrdd Iechyd Prifysgol Hywel Dda) is the local health board of NHS Wales for the west of Wales. Established on 1 October 2009 from the merger of the Hywel Dda NHS Trust, the Pembrokeshire Local He ...

which commissioned the company to provide nursing care for a disabled patient decided to replace nurses with healthcare assistants.

References

External links

Official websiteBadger Group GP Out of Hours Services
{{Med-company-stub Health care companies of the United Kingdom Private providers of NHS services Primary care