Interview with an Entrepreneur: Jos Belgrave

Jos Belgrave is developing a project called the Social Health Network (SHN) with Health Launchpad. The SHN is a social enterprise designed to help people to better manage their long term conditions. He talks to Zenobia Talati.

 

Name: Jos Belgrave

Age: 52

Occupation: Social Entrepreneur

Project: Social Health Network

 

 

Tell us about SHN?

We want to help people take control of their long term condition and understand it. Then adjust their health behaviours, and then, through taking that control, integrate with all the other aspects of healthcare that are out there at the moment but which evidence suggests people don’t use that effectively.

The role of employers in delivering healthcare is interesting, particularly as you get into the more preventive side of healthcare, the less medical aspects and the more psycho-social aspects of health. Our aim is a network of people covering the country working with different employers, through health circles. They are the actual interaction that we organise. All the members will be linked together through the web world so it will be a virtual environment for social networking, for access to health records and access to information.

What drives what you do?

A family friend had diabetes with a huge range of complications. She had rheumatoid arthritis as well. She died eighteen months ago, in my view from a range of complications to fairly controllable diseases. The integration of care that she received was poor. She wasn’t the kind of person who was assertive enough to take control and to make sure the system worked for her. Coming at it from another direction I’ve got a lot of experience in delivering healthcare services and I believe that we use our doctors incredibly inefficiently.

I think that there are far more effective models I’ve seen elsewhere in the world which use support workers, in other words trained non-doctors to deliver healthcare. The doctors themselves become the support members of the health care team.

What does social innovation mean to you?

People get very hooked up on “innovation” and buzzwords like it. I think innovation is about looking at things differently and getting people to behave differently and interact in a different way. People talk about innovation in a rather abstract way, which I don’t like, as though innovation was not about the people. I suppose it’s also about creating clever widgets but that’s not my world. I’m more interested in innovation around process and delivery.

Why is your project innovative?

It brings together a number of strands, mixes them up and comes out with something that is different from anything else. I don’t think enough people are approaching the question of what is the role of employers in delivering healthcare? Yes, there’s occupational health, very much based in the old industrial medicine. Health and safety, is another type of culture. But the progressive employers that I’ve been talking to really are starting to get the fact that there’s a social need for them to become involved with the health of their employees. They’ve got an aging population they want to keep in the workforce. Therefore they need to help those people manage their health effectively. So employers see the strategic need for SHN.

Would you describe yourself as a “social entrepreneur”? What exactly does it mean?

A social enterprise behaves in a commercial way but its primary output is social impact. It goes back to the old triple-bottom line story where what I look for is maximising social impact, minimising environmental impact and making a profit. I have absolutely no problems about the profit-making requirements. If you want to sustain and grow a business you have to make a profit. But a social enterprise balances those requirements in a different way than a FTSE 100 company would for example. It’s not a radically new concept. So am I a social entrepreneur? Yes I’ve run other businesses, set up other businesses. It’s nice to have different frameworks for setting up businesses. I find that an interesting challenge.

What do you think are the skills and qualities that entrepreneurs share?

You have to be prepared to fail; you have to be quite comfortable with risk. I find being an entrepreneur quite paradoxical because you have to have both a very wide strategic vision, while at the same time having an incredibly focussed activity. Because you have to have the vision to know where you’re going, but you have to then be able to bring that down to what you have to get done today, to get closer to that vision. And very often you get people who get one or the other. For me it’s about creativity. I enjoy the creativity of building businesses. Some people can paint, some can sing...I build businesses. That’s my creativity.

Have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I started life as a vet, I bought a small practice in Sussex a long time ago, 1984, and I enjoyed building that business and I found I was good at it. After I’d been there 10 years I had 13 vets working for me, it was one of the biggest practices in the south of England, just looking after horses. I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur but I found I was good at it.

I’ve been a trustee on one charity; I’m currently a trustee on another charity. I think there is a lot that charities can achieve, but I think there are issues around their internal culture and the skill sets they have that makes it quite difficult for some of them to do service delivery. So I’m interested in that middle state between my entrepreneurial venture capital hat and my charity trustee hat. There’s something in-between and that’s what I’m exploring at the moment.

What is most challenging about what you do?

You have to be very careful not to let yourself become isolated. The other thing is that all the energy comes from you. If you were to sit at your desk all day and do nothing, then nothing would happen. So it’s finding that energy every day to drive stuff forward. So that effort and isolation could be an issue allied with the fact that you live everyday with the possibility that it might not succeed.

What are the benefits of working with the HIA team?

One of them is you need other people to be interested in what you’re doing, to keep that high energy up. I’m fairly self-driven; I rely on myself to get things done. But I do need to have other people to be enthusiastic about what I’m doing, to bounce ideas off, and then you start to see it slightly differently to how you did before. That’s almost a social support network, but with a focus on the business. The other aspect is the Young Foundation’s good contacts and networks.

What do you do when you’re not working hard as a social entrepreneur?

I’m lucky enough to live in Sussex, in the countryside, so I spend quite a chunk of everyday walking my dog. I have a very energetic spaniel and we go up on the South Downs. I enjoy sailing and I enjoy my family life. I’m married. I’ve got two sons. One’s mad about cars the other’s mad about music so I go to concerts and things with them.

What will you do after the SHN project is up and running? Have you got any more big ideas?

For the foreseeable future I’m wedded to this project because if you don’t have that level of commitment you just won’t get anywhere. I’ve given up making plans. Three or five years is as far as I try and look.

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