This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our and .
It was in 1980 that Angela Gifford decided to leave her UK banking career of 16 years and enter the world of caring for older people who wished to remain living in their own home rather than moving into an aged care facility. Having been brought up in a close family where caring for older relations was part of everyday family support it was a familiar world. Her company Able was launched in September that year.
In the middle 1980’s Margaret Thatcher’s Government began to plan for future care services, realising that in the coming decades there would be an exponential rise in the number of older people. It was her Government’s aim to give people the choice of where they were to be cared for and by whom the care would be provided. This option would also become the right of younger disabled people.
Having been an established care provider for almost a decade and realising the enormous changes that were coming, Angela became a Founder Member of The United Kingdom Home Care Association which represents providers of care services. One of her first tasks was to chair the committee which wrote the first Code of Practice for home care agencies and this was the benchmark used for standards of UK care provision until the introduction of national, legislated standards fourteen years later.
In her 33 years in the UK care industry Angela has worked with all levels of Government, related professionals, statutory, private and voluntary and many thousands of older and disabled people and their families. Her company, Able Community Care has provided over 60 million hours of home care to people of all ages with high dependency care needs who prefer not to go into an aged or residential care setting.
Since 1990 Angela has been a UK Law Society Expert Witness with reference to projecting the cost of care in personal injury litigation and since 2008 has worked as an international care consultant.
Angela regularly writes for UK publications, writes an online weekly Care Newsflash and has appeared on both radio and television in connection with topical care issues.
Angela will be a speaker at the 2nd annual Younger People with very High & Complex Care Needs Conference, held on the 17th & 18th June in Melbourne. She will give an insight into how the UK provides reliable, responsible, home care for younger people with high complex care needs.