Caring for You Nursing Agency - Lifetime Achievement Award - Business Services

Company: Caring for You Nursing Agency, Melbourne, Australia
Company Description: Starting with just three nurses in 2004, Caring for You Nursing Agency is now Australia’s largest nurse-owned nursing agency, placing 1,000 nurses and carers into shifts each week across four Australian states in hospitals, community care settings and aged are facilities.
Nomination Category: Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Lifetime Achievement Award - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: Louise Thomson RN, RM

Louise Thomson RN RM was the Founder and CEO of Caring for You Nursing Agency for 16 years until she departed this life suddenly in February 2021.

Louise was the Queen and heartbeat of Caring for You and had an ineffable way of drawing people into her world with her vibrant light and passion for care.

A registered nurse and midwife, Louise left an indelible mark on the Australian Agency Nursing Industry, transforming the way agency nurses are respected and supported in the workforce.

After graduating in 1978, Louise worked in various hospitals in Australia and the United Kingdom as an agency nurse and midwife and did not feel valued. This experience inspired her to create Caring for You Nursing Agency with the commitment that “everything we do is done from a nurse’s perspective!”

Starting with just three nurses in 2004, Caring for You is now Australia’s largest nurse-owned nursing agency, placing 1,000 nurses and carers into shifts each week across four states in hospitals, community care settings and aged are facilities.

When Louise started Caring for You, she ran a local Aged Care facility managers network for ten years before expanding the network to be the state-wide Managers in Aged Care Victoria, hosting monthly networking events and engaging keynote speakers from the Aged Care Sector.

With Louise’s commitment to best-practice care, all recruited nurses and carers at Caring for You are interviewed face-to-face, which is still a unique point of difference in the Agency Nursing Sector.

Through its positive and supportive workplace culture, Caring for You has been a refuge for many agency nurses who have felt unsupported in the wider nursing industry and provided them with opportunities to excel.

Louise’s legacy has also impacted the residential aged care facilities in which her staff are placed, as her nurses in pink developed a reputation for being “Simply the Best”.

Louise routinely provided opportunities to further the training and career advancement of both her internal staff and agency nurses, many of whom have been dedicated staff for several years.

Louise successfully steered Caring for You through the Global Financial Crisis during a period when Australian public funding for healthcare was slashed, which resulted in a significant drop in nurse-to-patient ratios in Aged Care and a subsequent increased demand for agency nurses.

In 2011, Louise built the business to new heights through the introduction of a custom-built software platform, which maximised the efficiency of placing nurses into shifts in various healthcare settings.

Then at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Louise positioned Caring for You as a leading supplier to the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for the Surge Workforce and established the Caring for You Nurse-led COVID Response Team, whose procedures were used as a benchmark by the DHHS as best practice.

Under Louise’s leadership, the efforts of Caring for You in 2020 saw the company win a number of awards, including a Bronze Stevie International Award for Best Practice Response to the 2020 Pandemic, a finalist nomination for the APSCo Award for Best Response to the 2020 Pandemic WHS and a finalist nomination for RCSA’s Excellence in Customer Service Award.

Through partnering with the Recruitment, Staffing and Consulting Association of Australia and New Zealand, Louise provided access to the Caring for You software platform to assist the national COVID-19 response in the Aged Care Surge Workforce.

As CEO of Caring for You, Louise delivered thousands of Christmas hampers every year, established an annual staff scholarship, sponsored Australia’s first courage camp for teen girls, and awarded staff excellence awards every year, among sponsoring several other community initiatives.

Louise’s work in empowering women to progress their corporate careers and develop their personal lives will be memorialised through The Louise Foundation, established in 2021 by the Thomson Family in her honour.

Summary

-Establishing Australia's largest nurse-owned nursing agency as an entrepreneur in 2004
-Creating an environment wherestaff stay for yearsdue to high staff satisfaction levels
-Improving the perception of the Australian agency nursing industry by developing a reputation forexcellent professional agency nurses
-Growing a company that employs 5,500 agency healthcare workers across four Australian states
-Steering Caring for You through the Global Financial Crisis to record profits through the introduction of innovative client relationship technology in 2011
-Leading Caring for You through the COVID-19 pandemic in the Australian city of Melbourne, which experienced one of the most severe lockdowns in the world
-Benchmarking the standards of COVID-19 infection control in residential aged care facilities, according to the Victorian state Department of Health and Human Services
-Maintaininga record number of employees and recovering to record service delivery levels in 2021, following the height of the pandemic in Australia