Transforming Care, a Bramble Hub consulting partner, was founded in 2014 by Richard Cohen. As the company’s name suggests, Richard is passionate about bringing positive change to organisations that provide health and care services to people and communities. The company specialises in organisational and system change, from strategy through to implementation. “We are regularly contracted to produce business cases, mobilize and help deliver complex programmes of work, support with cost improvement, and optimise use of technology,” Richard explains.

Richard’s career began in the private sector. “I started out in Barclays’ graduate programme doing project and change management, and then felt I wanted to contribute socially, so I became an IT and Business teacher. That was less rewarding than I expected, so I moved into local government (at Salford Council). There, I honed my programme and project management skills, and then switched to consultancy – first with Deloitte, then Ernst and Young. Most of my time there was spent delivering health and social care engagements.”

Now, he runs Transforming Care using an associate model, and a hand-picked network of highly experienced consultants.

“Most of our engagements involve two to three people. We offer face-to-face interaction with senior people in all our engagements and offer significantly better value for money than larger consultancies. We have been involved with over 20 significant engagements and touched in excess of 100 organisations spanning central and local government, acute and specialist care provision, health commissioning, community healthcare (both mental and physical), social care, the voluntary and community sector and most recently life sciences (with a focus on medical devices)”

Richard has spent a significant amount of time thinking about the NHS and its problems, and it is clear, when one talks to him, that he cares deeply, and wants to make a difference. Asked which are the biggest issues that need solving, he reels off a long list: “The NHS waiting lists, general inefficiency and a lack of productivity, sub-optimal leadership, increasing the use of technology, making it an attractive place to work, partner relationships, rebalancing the relationship/social contract with the public around expectations….the list goes on…”.

He believes that the NHS’s deepest problems are structural: “The NHS can never solve the problems of the NHS from within – this needs external help from the broader public sector as the pressures on the NHS are often symptoms of problems elsewhere e.g. poverty, poor diet, homelessness, lack of housing, worklessness etc. . The Healthcare system needs more standardisation and better-defined red lines on what it will and will not provide. It needs to be an attractive place to work for talented people..”

When he isn’t trying to change the world, Richard claims to be a budding chef with a flair for Southeast Asian and Mediterranean cuisine and a DIY enthusiast.

Transforming Care became a Bramble Hub partner to access frameworks and grow its client base which can be often hard as an SME. Richard values the Bramble Hub offer and our proactiveness in the market. He is looking forward to building a long term mutually beneficial partnership.