Officially registered as a company in 2016, Hamill Homecare began delivering care services the following year and has since grown steadily under owner and managing director Louise Hamill.
She currently employs 31 people supporting 25 clients across the Stirling and Clackmannanshire area with 700 hours of care each week. Ms Hamill says though the number of clients "might seem modest", her previous clinical experience has led her to focus on providing consistent relationship-based care rather than "rushed visits". The company is now actively working towards expanding into East Dunbartonshire.
What led you to set up your own business?
I studied medicine and worked in hospitals for 12 years across several specialities, including in acute medical wards.
Throughout my clinical work, one issue kept presenting itself: delayed and failed discharges from hospital, often due to inadequate homecare provision. People were either stuck in hospital because care packages weren’t available or discharged without the right support and ended up back in hospital within 24 hours.
It became clear to me that care at home needed to be better: more flexible, more clinically informed and more consistent. I’ve always had a bit of an entrepreneurial streak so founding Hamill Homecare felt like a natural way to combine my medical background with my desire to improve things. I wanted to create a service that met not just the basic needs of clients, but their wider emotional and medical needs too.
How did you finance the start-up?
The business is 100% owned by me. I started it with a modest amount of personal savings and worked locum shifts in the NHS to fund those early days. We’ve been profitable since the beginning and have grown steadily by reinvesting those profits into the business.
What kind of care do you provide?
We deliver a wide range of support to adults over the age of 16, including the elderly and people with long-term or complex conditions. Our care includes personal care, meal preparation, medication management, overnight care and respite.
We also have a complex care service led by a registered complex care nurse, supporting clients with needs such as tracheostomies and PEG feeding. Each care package is tailored to the needs of the individual.
Every carer we recruit has at least six months of relevant experience and undergoes thorough training. But more than that, we look for compassion. We ask every applicant to tell us about a time their care made a difference to someone’s life because ultimately, you can teach the practical skills, but you can’t teach someone to care with love and that’s at the heart of Hamill Homecare.
Pay rates for carers are usually well below the national median – how does this affect recruitment and retention within the wider industry?
Low pay is a huge issue in the sector. Many carers are paid less than supermarket workers, despite doing complex, emotionally demanding work, often alone and at unsocial hours. That lack of recognition drives people out of the profession.
It’s short-sighted to pay so poorly in the care sector; without carers, everything would come to a standstill, and the implications would be far-reaching.
At Hamill Homecare, we pay significantly above the real living wage, starting at £14.50 an hour, rising to £18.50, plus 45p per mile for fuel. We also pay our carers full pay for the duration of each shift, not just for contact time. This helps us attract and retain experienced carers.
But pay alone isn’t enough: we offer 24/7 support, regular check-ins and small personal touches like handwritten cards. Carers stay with us because they feel valued and have time to provide proper care – our personal care visits last 45 minutes. It’s about culture as much as compensation.
How as a society how can we better fund the growing need for care across an ageing population?
First, we need to understand that social care is essential, not optional. It's not just about supporting older people; we look after adults from the age of 16. It’s important to remember that anyone could need care at any time: whether that’s as a result of a life-altering accident or living with a condition like MS or Parkinson’s.
The consequences of underfunding social care are serious: it leads to delayed hospital discharges, worsens NHS backlogs and causes unnecessary suffering.
The solution is simple but not easy: social care needs to be properly funded. If we invested in care at home, it would ease pressure on hospitals and deliver long-term savings. Right now, social care is treated like the NHS’s poor relation and that needs to change.
What are your aspirations for your business?
We want to grow, but in the right way. We're expanding into East Dunbartonshire this year and are especially keen to grow our complex care service. Too often, people are told their care needs are too high to be supported at home. That’s rarely true. With the right provider and the right planning, most people can stay in their own homes.
Longer-term, I want Hamill Homecare to remain family-run, values-driven and known for providing consistently excellent care. We want to grow sustainably, without ever compromising on the standards we set or the relationships we build.
What would make it easier to achieve those aspirations?
A shift in public perception: that good care costs money. If we want to keep people safe, independent and out of hospital, we need to understand that high-quality care isn’t cheap, nor should it be.
What is the most valuable lesson you have learned in your career?
That you have to be tenacious. Things will go wrong, obstacles will arise and progress won’t always be linear. But if you believe in what you’re doing, get back up and try, try again, determination and resilience will carry you through.
Share