What elite sport taught us about care: our day at the Care Leadership Exchange 

On Thursday 5 November, Amanda Winnard, our Head of People, and Nicola (Nic) Cope, our Head of Care Operations, swapped the office for St George’s Park, home of England’s national football teams. They were there for the Care Leadership Exchange, an invitation-only gathering of care leaders hosted by Indeed. It wasn’t a conference. It was a day of honest conversation about how care providers build teams that perform when it matters most. 

Here’s what they took away, and what it means for the people we support and the people who work with us. 

Why the Care Leadership Exchange matters for home care 

Home care across the UK faces the same pressures year after year: recruiting good carers, keeping them, and building a culture where they want to stay. The Care Leadership Exchange brought care leaders together to tackle those questions head on, using lessons from elite sport and real labour market data. 

For a home care and mobility provider like Premier Community, those conversations aren’t abstract. Every carer we recruit and keep is someone who turns up for a client tomorrow morning. 

It was also a great opportunity to represent Premier Community among the sector’s leaders, and right on our own patch. St George’s Park is just down the road from Swadlincote, in the communities our carers support every day. 

A venue built for high performance 

The setting set the tone. St George’s Park sits in 330 acres of Staffordshire countryside and has been the National Football Centre since 2012. It’s where England’s teams train and prepare, which made it a fitting place to talk about performance.

High performance under pressure: lessons from elite sport 

The programme focused on one idea: how do you build a team that performs consistently under pressure? 

• Matt Burney, Senior Strategic Advisor at Indeed, opened with “High Performance Under Pressure”. He then hosted a panel of people and recruitment leaders from UK care providers on what high performance looks like in practice. 

• Dr Chris Shambrook, performance psychologist at PlanetK2, spent 22 years with GB Rowing across five Olympic Games. His session looked at culture and high performance through the lens of elite sport. 

For Amanda, the sessions came back to one idea: great care comes from great teams. 

“It showed me how I can best guide and support our teams to deliver the best quality care, through a strong team culture and shared goals.” — Amanda Winnard, Head of People

The UK care workforce: insights from the data 

Chris Taylor from Indeed shared the bigger picture on the UK care workforce. He covered wider labour market trends, candidate supply and the policy headwinds facing care employers. Rakhee Bajwa from Indeed closed the afternoon with reflections on the day. 

What we’re bringing back to Premier Community 

Amanda and Nic came home with fresh ideas and renewed energy. They’ll be sharing what they learned with our managers and care teams, with a focus on building a strong team culture and shared goals, so our carers feel supported to deliver the best quality care.

A big thank you to Indeed for the invitation, and to everyone who shared their experience so openly. 

Join a team that’s building for the future 

Events like the Care Leadership Exchange help us keep raising the bar for our clients and our carers. If you want to work for a home care provider that invests in its leaders and its people, join our team.