East Coast Community Healthcare

We are delighted to be working exclusively with East Coast Community Healthcare (ECCH) in their search to find their new Executive Commercial Director. 

With its headquarters in Lowestoft, ECCH is a staff-owned Social Enterprise formed in 2011 as part of the Government initiative to separate the roles of commissioning and provider.

Around 700 employees deliver over 30 wide-ranging services - community nursing and therapies, smoking cessation, speech and language therapy, dietetics, stroke recovery, cardiac rehabilitation and palliative care in partnership with St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich, to name a few - to some 70,000 service users throughout Suffolk and Norfolk. ECCH has contracts with the NHS and Norfolk County Council and an annual turnover of circa £38m.

What makes ECCH different is that they operate as a social enterprise (Community Interest Company 'CIC') which offers the opportunity to create a more sustainable and flexible organisation, to take charge of their own destiny and make real improvements in services to patients. They reinvest any surplus in benefitting the community whether that be by supporting local projects or investing in extra staff and services to provide care for people and build health communities. We have an ethos of high quality care, every time. ECCH has twice been in the short running for ‘Social Enterprise of the Year’ awarded by SEUK.

They are owned by their employees which means their people have a stake and therefore a real say in how the organisation works. 76% of staff are shareholders - well above average for a social enterprise - and they have two Staff Directors, appointed by their shareholder colleagues, who sit on the Board and shape the business. ECCH also have a Shareholder Council, made up of staff representatives from across the organisation, which is consulted on issues affecting their business. For example, shareholders played a key role in the appointment of the current Chair and Non-Executive Directors.

As a Social Enterprise they operate a number of commercial activities to subsidise running costs, support core healthcare roles and generate social value, in the communities they serve and the wider health and social care system in Norfolk and Waveney.