Celebrating a Decade of Enhancing the Quality of People’s Lives
How We’ve Achieved 10 Years of Change in Nursing and Social Care Services
This past year will be remembered by all of us for many things. A year when the world changed, when we experienced unthought-of challenges and were called upon to pull together like never before. As we start to move forward, this year is also a time for us at Resilience to recognise achievement: we are celebrating 10 great years of being in business. That’s 10 years of proudly helping to change the way Ireland approaches health and social care. Ten years that have brought invaluable support to people with disabilities, and that have made it possible for people with serious illness or injuries to choose home not hospital for their care. How did we get here? Let’s have a look at the story of Resilience and some of the milestones we’ve reached along the way…
A Team on a Mission
Founded by Ennis man Brian Crowley, Resilience was formed in 2011 as a health and social care provider. With its headquarters in Ennis, there was a grand total of TWO staff members, and no service users or customers! Our goal? We believed there was a growing need for change in health and social care and envisioned a much more personal, individualised approach that would truly put service users at the centre and enhance their quality of life.
The first area we focused on was the development of a specialist nursing care service to provide support for people with complex needs, within their family home. It meant children and adults requiring specialised care due to an accident, injury or disability, could receive high quality nursing care in the comfort of their own home. We called this Advanced Community Care – and our very first service was launched in 2012 in Dublin.
At the same time, within social care we were looking at how we could provide services that, rather than limiting their experiences, would enable service users to live their best life possible and to realise their potential. This thinking led to our Social Care division – offering people with Intellectual Disability and/or Autism a range of services including Residential Care, Outreach and Day Services. This came to fruition in 2014 when we opened our first residential service – Pebble Beach in Kerry.
Making Milestones
From this time on, we travelled a road of many ‘firsts’, with extensive development and growth of services. In 2019, when we opened our first Prader Willi Syndrome service in county Wexford – one of very few such services in Ireland. We also opened our first shared care service in county Kildare 2019 also saw us go live with our first Day Services. In our Advanced Community Care division, we were the first home nursing provider to employ our own Nurse Tutor, providing NMBI accredited courses to our employees.
Today, as we turn 10, we have so much to celebrate! We now support over 300 service users and families. Our HQ remains in Ennis, but we also have offices in Cork, Dublin and Wexford and we provide services countrywide.
The Power of our People
Behind so much of our success are some exceptional people: highly skilled and experienced in their specialist fields. In 2016 Laura Keane was appointed as Managing Director, Sinead Butler was appointed as Head of Social Care in 2016, while 2018 saw the arrival of Olivia Sinclair as Head of Advanced Community Care.
10 Years of Living Our Principles
We believe we owe a big part of our success to the principles that guide us – and the fact that we’ve always been very clear as to our ‘why?’ Our purpose is to enhance the quality of peoples live and we do this by ‘Realising Potential’ – and this applies as much to our employees as it does to the people our services support. The fact that we had 8 internal promotions into leadership positions in the first 4 months of 2021, is testament to how we walk the talk. We also currently have 5 employees studying for a master’s and one for PHD – all supported by Resilience.
And while we’ve worked hard these past 10 years, we’ve had a lot of fun too. An important Resilience Principle is ‘Have Fun and Celebrate Success’. It’s about recognising the victories and the wins, big and small. And whether it’s hosting an annual Summer and Christmas party for our service users, holding fun internal competitions, or just sharing news on our internal social media platform – we never forget to mark the special occasions.
Thank you for sharing this special birthday with us. Here’s to the next 10 years of enhancing the quality of people’s lives and realising potential as we continue to help make a difference where it’s needed most.