By Mia Fisher-Howe on December 22, 2021
This year has presented unique challenges for Spirit, as it has for all – but despite that, we’ve had many things to celebrate this year. At the end of 2021, we asked our Spirit family to reflect on the last year, think about what Spirit means to them, and what they consider their ‘2021 win’. Here are (just) some of our key achievements, along with some of our favourite quotes.
Our family
Our Spirit family continues to grow, expanding by 35% as we welcome new colleagues to come on our journey. Spirit’s staff are a dedicated, passionate bunch of people who are all working hard to make health easy, whilst taking the time to support each other and use our collective strengths. It’s our people who make up Spirit Health!
“I’m incredibly proud of finance, procurement & customer services for embracing significant change this year as we continue to grow. This work has been supported by all our colleagues across the Group. Thank you all for your patience and understanding when needed. I am very proud of everyone. We have achieved so much again in just a year.”
– Louisa Poole, Finance Director
“It truly is an honour to be a part of such an AMAZING company that thrives off making a difference and values the efforts of its teams which is displayed through its generosity. The leadership is strong and has done a smashing job at keeping the team connected, better than ever, which has enabled us to work seamlessly with each other.”
– Benita Shepherd, Education Services Educator
We welcomed 3 new GP surgeries into the Spirit family and continued to help where needed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, successfully implementing COVID-19 vaccination programmes to try and reduce the strain on the NHS.
“My 2021 win the proud moment we became part of history and vaccinated for the COVID jab in our own surgery. It felt amazing to know we were a part of the battle against COVID-19, and it was great to see the positive impact the vaccines have had. The beginning of 2020 was sad for GP surgeries as we had to see many deaths, but we were so pleased that these rates started to drop when the vaccination came out.”
– Nazia Khan, Patient Services Advisor
Our work with the NHS
We’ve built many new relationships throughout the year, delivering partnerships that allow us to work towards making health easy and saving the NHS money and resources.
“Winning contracts in the face of some very tough competition has been a massive achievement for us. It’s a major milestone that starts our journey to deliver brilliant Active Implementation, not just for our own brands but for major pharmaceutical companies and the NHS.”
– Duncan Richardson, Managing Director for Implement Division
Our digital division has seen double-digit growth in revenues and continues to work hard to ensure that the NHS has tools at their disposal to help manage the ongoing capacity challenges through offering quick deployment of our Virtual COVID-19 Wards. Our research with virtual wards has been peer reviewed and published in the British Journal of Healthcare Management.
“It’s brilliant that our COVID-19 virtual ward study has been peer reviewed; it means that the methods we used have been validated by healthcare professionals and our outcomes merit being published. It’s recognition that our work holds significance whilst providing important insights into digital healthcare!”
– Jim Swift, Health Economist
Helping those with diabetes
Our new diabetes-focused pharmacy start-up has quadrupled its business, meaning that we’ve been able to support those with diabetes to live well and manage their condition. Because our pharmacy shows exceptional promise, we’ve also been nominated for Best Startup at the 2022 Medilink Business Awards, which is amazing recognition for the services we provide.
We have also continued to provide our online structured diabetes education sessions to those with Type 2 diabetes, hitting the key milestone of welcoming our 10,000th patient onto our education programme. We have also continued to make our sessions more accessible through multilingual sessions, delivering our first session in Urdu as well launching our face-to-face sessions again towards the back end of the year.
“My 2021 win was having a team that works really well together, which has meant that we have been able to overcome the struggles of the last 18 months and finally bring our valuable service back to the community and restart our EMPOWER sessions face to face.”
– Tracey Cope, Education Services Educator
Awards & Recognitions
From winning Best COVID-19 Remote Monitoring Solution at the Health Tech Digital Awards 2021, to Supporting Healthcare Teams through Technology at the Forward Healthcare Awards 2021, our digital division has had brilliant recognition for our remote patient monitoring platform; CliniTouch Vie.
“My 2021 win is the awards success we’ve had for CliniTouch Vie – we always strive for brilliance, but there’s something special about having others recognise it in our work too!
Having written a fair few of the entries, I’m always blown away to see the genuine impact we have with what we do. It’s one of the (many) reasons why I’m so glad I joined Spirit – bring on 2022!”
– Lisa O’Keeffe, Head of Marketing for Digital Division
We were also recognised as Company of the Year by the Leicestershire Live Business Awards and one of the best mid-sized companies to work for in the UK, ranking #29 in the East Midlands.
Going into 2022
We don’t know what next year will bring, but there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that we’ll approach it with our values of vigour, brilliance and family. We have lots of exciting projects in the pipeline and we’re looking forward to working towards our mission of making health easy – here’s to 2022!
