Member Spotlight: “We have the expertise, imagination and passion and we are going to put it to work”

The typical age of diagnosis of a long-term neurological condition, for those Leuchie serves, is in the late 40s / early 50s. It’s a time when most of us are mortgaged to the hilt, working as hard as we ever have done and if we have children, they need all of our support through their difficult teenage years.

It’s against this backdrop that a diagnosis occurs, often after a long process. Very soon, many will no longer be able to walk, work will become impossible and with the loss of employment comes the loss of income, friends and the opportunity to support a family.

A healthy, independent and fulfilled future can seem impossible to imagine and trying to get support from our overwhelmed health and social care service is a daily battle. A visiting GP said last week that it takes on average two years for a specialist neurological appointment.

Help with care at home is getting even harder to find. This means that ever more physical and emotional responsibility for health and care delivery falls to immediate family, who themselves can become overwhelmed, exhausted and isolated.

This is not only a challenge today for a few vital individuals. With an ageing population and reducing workforce in Scotland there will come a point, within all of our lifetimes, when there is an insufficient care workforce to meet the needs of the significant many. Some would say we have reached the tipping point already.

This is being experienced today by many who need health and social care now. It’s a concern we are beginning to address at Leuchie, with those who come to have a break with us who have a condition such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Motor Neurone Disease and some aspects of stroke.

For nearly 15 years the Leuchie House team has been developing award-winning and Grade 5/6 quality health care and support services in the face of growing demand, a challenging labour market and ever tighter fiscal constraints.

With people coming to Leuchie House from all over Scotland and further afield and with bookings running a year or more ahead, we face a challenge: how do we do more of what we do well?

Our first response was to fundamentally re-imagine respite. We had fallen into a trap of conflating our purpose, with how we go about delivering that purpose. The walls of our building had become a constraint on our thinking.

So, we took on a purpose-built holiday home with the highest levels of equipment and access standards. This enables families to have a break together. On the strength of this we worked with a manufacturer to produce a highly accessible caravan, which we now also run. These two facilities doubled the number of families we could support and broadened that support, beyond the walls of Leuchie House.

We began to look at the causes of stress in the lives of the people we support as a route into thinking and creating solutions around what people wanted respite from.

We identified health improvement, re-enablement through technology and re-connecting people to social and professional relationships as three priorities. Consequently, we invested in a highly sophisticated in-house team of allied health professionals including an in-house health care technology team. We now ensure that the impact of a break can last long beyond the break itself.

As we approach our 15^th birthday in 2026, we will step up this way of thinking about future need and we will respond. Our intention is to grow our impact tenfold by the end of the decade, and to do so in four ways:

We will:

• Provide physical, building based & specialist services where they don’t exist today.
• Be present through technology in the homes of people who we don’t reach in physical resources.
• Deploy and manage enabling technology to maximise independence within people’s homes.
• Reach into the rich experience and expertise, developed over 15 years and in partnership with those we serve, their families, our NHS, universities, institutional grant makers and private sector investment to develop and deliver solutions through innovation and research.

Waiting for governments to answer the problems which we are driven to resolve is not an effective solution. We have the expertise, imagination and passion and we are going to put it to work…just like you do every day.