Xavi Comas, Global Chief Operations Officer & UK Managing Director at Lura Care
The Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the UK was delighted to recently welcome Lura Care as our new Patron. Lura Care is a home healthcare services company for dependent people or people with mobility problems that works with a single objective: to break the mobility barrier for all these people, guaranteeing universal access to the services they need through a mobile care model that attends them in their own place of residence.
Could you provide a brief overview of Lura Care and its presence in the UK market?
At Lura Care we have developed an innovative model to bring oral health services to the patients’ place of residence, accredited by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), that allows us to care for the oral health of older people and people with disability who live in care homes, day centres and particular homes.
Our professionals come with an approved mobile team to attend them, with all the guarantees of quality and hygiene, and avoiding their displacement whenever possible. Our team is specialised in caring for dependent people, prepared to deal with any complexity in the treatments, and to carry out their work with the special sensitivity required by particularly vulnerable people. And we also collaborate with a wide network of dental clinics for certain surgical treatments when necessary, offering an adapted transport service and accompaniment for this purpose.
We started our operations in the UK in the first quarter of 2024 with the opening of our first dental hub in Hampton Hill, London, from where we provide services to care homes and day centres in London, the South East and part of the East of England.
We are currently engaged with 82 care homes, in which we have provided services to more than 1,600 elderly and dependent people living in care homes. And we are scaling up across various care home groups, which are also present in other regions.
Today Lura Care is the leading company in its sector in Europe. Thanks to the trust in us by the more than 1,000 care homes and day centres with which we collaborate in Spain, Italy and UK, we have managed to attend to more than 120,000 people with our mobile services adapted to their needs.
As a new Patron of the Chamber, what benefits do you hope to gain from our collaboration?
We are honoured to be able to join the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the UK as a patron, as the ties between the two countries run deep and the role of SMEs is fundamental to continue to bring value to the citizens of both countries on a reciprocal basis, in this case in the field of healthcare.
In the UK there are around 4 million older people (40% of the over 65s) living with a limiting illness or disability, of whom 500,000 live in residential care. And oral health is one of the major health care challenges: 90% suffer from periodontitis and/or caries, around 60% need dentures renewed, and the average is more than 5 years since their last dental check-up.
In this country 95% of homes for the elderly are private, and dentists often do not have the capacity to reach all these patients. And that is why at Lura Care we work to change this reality. We work to continue promoting a model of care that ensures the universal right to oral health for all dependent or mobility-impaired people, who otherwise risk being left completely unattended, as we have already done before in Spain and Italy.
And to this end, being a Patron of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the United Kingdom offers us a great opportunity to work on two key areas: promoting the transfer of necessary talent between Spain and the UK, closing the gap in the shortage of professionals, and accessing funding opportunities to continue boosting our healthcare coverage in the country.
What key values define your company, and how are these values integrated into your daily operations and customer interactions?
We are a social impact company, so we are committed to contributing to the advancement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as health and wellbeing (SDG 3) and the reduction of inequalities (SDG 10). And we combat the phenomenon of ageism that relegates millions of older people and limits their rights so that they can enjoy a full life with an optimal quality of life.
To achieve this, we are working hard to promote preventive measures. We carry out free, no-obligation dental check-ups at the centres themselves to find out about people’s state of health and their treatment needs, and we carry out free training activities on prevention and the development of hygiene habits among residents and users of the centres.
We also offer affordable treatment prices and flexible financing options, so that no one is left without the care they need for financial reasons. And we reinvest part of our income back into the centres themselves to help improve the services they
offer to their residents.
How does Lura Care differentiate itself from competitors in the UK, and what specific strategies do you employ to enhance your market position?
Our future strategy is based on specialization, as we focus exclusively on caring for dependent individuals or those with mobility issues, and on scaling up the know-how we have accumulated in serving these people.
Today Lura Care is the leading company in its sector in Europe. Thanks to the trust
placed in us by the more than 1,000 care homes and day centres with which we collaborate in Spain, Italy and UK, we have managed to attend to more than 120,000 people with our mobile services adapted to their needs.
All of this would not be possible without our cutting-edge technology. We have developed our own technology for the diagnosis and treatment of our patients, fully integrated in our CRM, which allows us to include in the system the diagnosis of the patients at the time of a check-up, or the actions taken during the treatments.
This system also allows us to keep in constant communication with their relatives, informing them at all times of the actions we are carrying out for the attention of their loved ones, and involving them in this care process, which is a key element in caring for particularly vulnerable people.
What is Lura Care vision for the future, and what specific strategies or actions are you implementing to achieve it?
Since the start of our operations in the UK we have reached agreements with several groups of care homes for the elderly, and we have already attended more than 1,300 patients from around eighty British centres.
Our plan is to continue investing in the UK in order to open offices in other major cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle from 2025 onwards, in order to continue bringing our services to all British citizens who need dental home care.
And we want to continue exporting our model to other countries such as Germany or France, with the aim that in 5 years we will be able to cover more than 2 million people, with 25 operational centres in five countries, and attend more than 300,000 people each year and carry out more than 70,000 treatments.
