The genesis of The Cambian Group was an 18-bed rehabilitation hospital that was piloted in 2003 in a company called NHP Healthcare Partnerships.
The company founders were driven by a desire to deliver better life outcomes for patients, often excluded from mainstream society and stigmatised because of their illness or disabilities. To achieve this, an innovative therapeutic programme called Active Care™ was developed.
The Active Care™ model was unique in providing a transparent and measurable way of mapping multi-disciplinary team (MDT) inputs as well as quantitative evaluation of patient progress.
In 2005, seven schools for children with Special Education Needs were purchased with the creation of Cambian Education was created. This acquisition brought with it a staff team with over 30 years of experience and expertise in Autistic Spectrum Disorders and associated challenging behaviours.
The Cambian Schools were the pioneers of the 52-week "Waking Day Curriculum" for students with autism and continue to lead with Information Communication Technologies in classrooms, behavioural therapy, speech and language therapy and an innovative curriculum.
Always moving toward a person-centred approach, Cambian Education and Cambian Healthcare continued to grow organically, developing leading-edge real estate and services to become market leaders in their respective fields.
During 2009, the divisions recognised the value of combining their clinical and educational functions and expertise to create a formidable force in the field of specialist healthcare and education. To this end, they worked towards the creation of The Cambian Group (Cambian), which was launched at the beginning of 2010.
In 2010, Cambian achieved significant growth in capability by joining with Care Aspirations, an independent provider of specialist learning disability services for adults. This provided exciting opportunities for continued growth spanning the needs of adults across both health and social care.
Listing on the London Stock Exchange
In April 2014, Cambian and Advanced Child Care merged and were listed on the London Stock Exchange to form Cambian Group Plc. This merger significantly added to the children’s service and added both children’s residential care homes and fostering.
Further acquisitions included:
Three specialist further education colleges from Mencap in June 2014.
In March 2015 By the Bridge, a leading independent fostering provider, specialising in therapeutic foster care for over 500 children. By The Bridge provides a differentiated service due to the significant emphasis placed on selecting and training foster parents on how best to meet the challenging needs of their foster children.
During 2015, Cambian acquired two further specialist schools from the charity sector and continued to develop organically its portfolio of specialist children’s care homes. Cambian also took the strategic decision to develop an integrated recovery model incorporating education, care and therapy focused on children and young people with the highest needs.
Sales of Adult Services
In December 2016, Cambian announced the sale of the Adult Services business to a Cygnet Healthcare, subsidiary of Universal Health Services, Inc., a major NYSE listed acute care and behavioural health services provider. This sale allowed Cambian to focus on being a market-leading provider of specialist children's services, with the aim of becoming the highest quality provider of specialist education and behavioural health services for children.
Purchase by CareTech Plc
On 18th October 2018, Cambian announced the completion of the acquisition of Cambian by CareTech Plc. This represents an exciting, new chapter for Cambian as, together with CareTech, they become one of the leading providers of social care services to both adults and children in the UK. Details of this transaction can be found here.
The completion of this acquisition brings together two highly complementary service offerings and areas of geographical focus. Cambian can now provide integrated care pathways nationwide, while also better servicing local authority partners and continuing to deliver strong user outcomes.
Cambian works with the majority of Local Authorities in England and Wales. Today we provide service that support over 2,000 children, we run 36 specialist schools and colleges, 195 care homes and one fostering service that operate across 10 branches across England. We employ more than 4,000 people.
