Legal advice is crucial in running a successful care home, and you can probably think of numerous occasions when you’ve had to run a query by your lawyer to better understand the legal implications of your decisions in the business of your care home.
Lawyers are best placed to understand pending legislation and legal processes, but sometimes they need assistance understanding how decisions might manifest themselves on the ground, and how they might interact with the practicalities of running a care home. That’s where we come in, working with law firms to enable them to best advise their clients. Samantha Burges, a Senior Associate Solicitor at Ridouts, describes how we’ve assisted her.
Experts in care
Solicitors play an important role in ensuring care homes are compliant and supported in the legal practicalities of running a home, such as in responding to CQC inspection reports and managing complaints. As qualified legal professionals, solicitors are best placed to understand legislation, and offer certified advice as to the legal implications of your decisions. However, sometimes, solicitors want to better understand how their advice might play out on the ground, and that’s where we can help, utilising our care expertise to set out how such advice might work in practice.
We’ve been working alongside Ridouts, a law firm which acts only for professionals in health and social care. This means that their knowledge is saturated just in the care sector, making them experts in their area of law. Senior Associate at Ridouts, Samantha Burges, explains how we’ve been helping them: “We work with Fulcrum in advising our clients on compliance issues within their services. We partner with Fulcrum because they have the specialist knowledge of the care sector. They’re able to go in beyond the ground, look at how our clients are doing, and then we’re able to provide the legal advice to complement what they can do.
“Fulcrum bring a lot of value to our clients. We’re solicitors and we look at the legal side, whereas Fulcrum are able to go in and look at our clients and work together in partnership with them to drive improvement within the services and give advice to make action plans in terms of ensuring that they can improve and prosper within the sector.”
Accessing a wide range of expertise
The Fulcrum team consists of a wide range of experts within the care sector, from dementia care, to compliance, to crisis management. So we can assist solicitors with in-depth knowledge across a broad spectrum of areas.
“We’ve seen Fulcrum grow,” explains Sam, “I mean, it feels like it was a smaller team at the start, and they’ve grown bigger and bigger and they’ve definitely diversified in terms of what they can offer our clients or their clients. You can have confidence in Fulcrum because they’re advisors and specialists. They know what they’re doing as they’re doing a lot of work in the care sector themselves and they have first-hand experience of the issues that providers are facing.”
Teamwork makes the dream work
The key to our successful partnership with law firms offering advice for health and social care is our ability to work collaboratively with them, becoming a valuable resource for them in better understanding care homes. Or, as Sam puts it, “They’re just a really great team to work with. They’re very personable, and they’re very, very, very good at what they do”.
Watch the full video interview on YouTube
If you’re a lawyer looking for expert advice on care homes and social care, please get in touch.