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To celebrate 25 years in business with Origin Spinal Injury Care, we invited one of our co-founders, Peter Henry, to reflect on 25 years in business…
August 1999 – August 2000 was a hellish year for Peter; I lost my job, a previous care business, earnings, my own care package and care funding, plus my much-loved mother died unexpectedly.
So, I had a choice – start again from nothing or give up and creep away. I’m not good at giving up, so I decided to give it a go with no real plan B. But, I knew I would need a sparring partner to help.
Linda and I had been good friends for 5 years, so I called her asking if she’d like to give up a teaching job in Denmark to come to England and start a new, exclusively live-in spinal injury care business from scratch…wonderfully, madly, she eventually said YES!
Between us, we knew we could do a better job than other agencies because of our personal experience of SCI care.
Why call it Origin? Well.. it happened by accident! As part of the business planning work, we needed to register a company, so we chose a pre-registered but not trading limited company, and ORIGIN jumped out at us. It signifies the source/start/beginning of something – plus it was short, memorable and different.
We got going in March 2001. After a rocky start when we were losing £10k per month, the business turned a corner…and away we went!
A major milestone was the hiring of our first-ever Care Manager, Georgie Richardson, who joined us in 2004. After hearing the ‘full and frank’ business discussions, AKA arguments, Linda and I had in a separate office, that were loud enough to penetrate a brick wall, she would quietly say, ‘I hate it when you two do that‘.
Oddly, wonderfully, even moments after real humdingers, Linda and I would be laughing and joking as friends. We are both well aware of how fortunate we are to be able to combine friendship with running a business together.
We bring different but complementary things to Origin. Linda brings Danish, humanist ways of working together and I bring personal knowledge of having a spinal injury and technical business skills. Fused together, these have been essential to establishing and developing Origin as a premium-quality UK and international specialist live-in SCI care provider, as distinct from general complex care.
Since 2004, we have grown organically and we now employ 15 office staff members plus an ever growing team of Personal Assistants across the UK. Over the years, as well as our wonderful team, a few other people have been instrumental to Origin’s success: Jeff Hindley as a friendly business advisor, Paul Wilkinson for financial advice and Doug Mullen for his patient explanations to help keep everything legal.
In 2005, we madly bought and renovated a French building, making two apartments in the South of France, one of which is fully adapted for disabled people.
In 2009, we moved away from our old manual care booking system to our first computerised system because, as my Dad wryly commented, ‘The company’s size should not be limited by the height of the office walls…’
Fast forward to November 2014 and we were awarded a special recognition award for outstanding support of Back Up, a spinal injury charity we have supported since day one.
In early 2020, COVID hit the world and caused chaos. We had to convert our 5-day face-to-face training course to an online programme ASAP. We managed it, and it allowed us to maintain client care and PA work throughout that dreadful 2-year period.
In 2024, we became a Spinal Injury Association Trusted Partner and our PA training course became accredited by the CPD Certification Service.
In 2025, we extended our Care Quality Commission registration from the standard ‘Personal Care’ to the much more ‘Treatment of Disease, Disorder and Injury’. Relatively few care agencies have this high a level of CQC accreditation.
Looking back, Linda and I are proud beyond words of Origin and how the company helps people with an SCI get on with living a full life while offering PAs and our office team interesting and rewarding work.
Looking back over the past 25years, too many different people have been involved to mention them all by name, but to you all we pass on a heartfelt THANK YOU!
With best wishes
Peter Henry
Chairman and Co-Founder