From bedside to boardroom

Making the journey from bedside to boardroom has enabled Sarah Fuller, CEO of Full Support Healthcare, to make a difference in a way that she felt unable to on the frontline of healthcare. Having initially trained as a nurse in 1993, she felt constrained in her role and decided that she wanted a career where she could use her nursing skills, but within a fastpaced, business environment. “I enjoyed working with patients, because I could make a difference on a day-to-day basis, but found that the levels of bureaucracy in the NHS acted as a hindrance to really pushing forward in making changes. I knew that I would quickly become frustrated at the slow pace of change. I found there were also barriers to personal progression, at that time. To get ahead, students would have to fund their own professional development courses and often use annual leave days to attend due to lack of funding. “Moreover, in my opinion, once nurses reached the top they became stuck in an office – nowhere near a patient – and would often face an increased risk of redundancy when budgets were cut. Ultimately, if you are going to climb the ladder, you need to consider where it is you are actually heading, I was ambitious but felt I could not risk the uncertainty of the NHS career path and, at this point, decided to switch to commercial path to achieve my future goals”. Sarah Fuller went on to secure a position selling surgical drapes and gowns for Kimberly Clark Healthcare: “l found that the fact I needed to be hands on with theatre staff really suited me. I loved the operating theatre environment and the role lent itself to delivering education on the frontline.

 It was fast paced and it allowed me to draw on my nursing skills. Having clinical experience was also a real advantage,” she commented. “My aim was to promote an understanding of the benefits of singleuse surgical drapes and gowns, as well as educate my customer base on the advantages of SMS polypropylene material – which had been developed to overcome issues with lint generation and flammability risks.” As business took off, Sarah Fuller was offered promotion into other areas of the business. However, she had just had her first daughter and the promotions offered would have involved international travel, with potentially lower earnings. “In medical sales you are often financially better off the nearer you are to the customer, and this was the case for me at the time,” she commented. “I was also not interested in a position where I would become reliant on others hitting their targets in order to achieve my financial goals. I needed to be in control of my own success and the only way to do this was to become self-employed.” Within twelve months of being self-employed, Sarah Fuller had sourced all required raw materials, designed a full range of surgical drapes and gowns, completed the CE marking process, clinically tested the products and was ready to launch. “I knew my previous customer base would support me and I was convinced that I could grow my business very quickly. I was completely single-minded and determined – I knew there was a gap in the market for a UK-based company to provide high quality SMS polypropylene drapes and gowns, at a competitive price. “I set out for Full Support Healthcare to become the ‘Easy Jet’ of the surgical products market by maintaining lower overheads than our competitors. I was not interested in ‘shaving’ off 5% from the current competitors’ price offering but to aggressively drive product prices down by as much as 20% to 30%.” At the same time as growing her market share, Sarah Fuller was also growing her family. “Often women climbing the corporate ladder make the decision not have children or do not see their children as often as they would like to and I wasn’t prepared to compromise on either. I am very impatient and want everything now, so I did not want to defer starting a family until the business was established, I knew there was never going to be a ‘right time’ so went ahead and juggled the two – it was a frantically busy time, but I have no regrets,” she commented. “I have worked for corporations where promotion does not fit well with family life, yet there is no reason why it shouldn’t. If someone needs to go to a sports day or school play, in our company, we insist they go. Once those important personal experiences have gone, you cannot turn back the clock.”

However, there were challenges ahead for Sarah Fuller when expecting her third child, as she was admitted to hospital at 24 weeks for the full duration of her pregnancy, due to complications: “I virtually moved my office to the bedside – it was important for me to ensure that customers were unaware that there may be an issue that might affect me being able to respond to business calls, so I did not tell anyone. “I would visit my prematurely born son on his ventilator in the special care baby unit and then go back downstairs to attend to 50 emails. It was a very fraught time and emotionally draining, but if something goes wrong in your personal life you have to fix it quick; people are not interested in your personal circumstances – they want 100% service and I was going to continue delivering it.” After a few years of rapidly growing Full Support Healthcare, Sarah Fuller managed to secure a place for the company on the NHSSC National Framework Agreement and, in her words, started to “rattle a few cages”. “Slowly over time, by travelling around and gaining each bit of business, we were able to reinvest in more staff until arriving at the structure we have today. In the last three years, we have seen 226% growth in turnover; we now have a 60% share of the single use surgical gown market, and are the second largest supplier of surgical drapes to NHS hospitals in the UK via NHSSC,” she continued. “We have also expanded into a 40,000 ft2 premises in Northamptonshire and taken the warehousing operations in-house which has further improved our service levels.” Although the business has grown at a rapid pace, Sarah Fuller explained how important it is to stay in direct contact with her customer base: “It is important to me that I do not operate in an ivory tower – I will never allow a top-heavy management structure to stop the flow of communication from the customer to me, and I want to spend as much time with customers as I can. I want to know how my sales staff are performing, what financial pressure customers are under, what we can do to alleviate that pressure, and I want to be told where we can improve our business.” Sarah Fuller added that she is: “not afraid of challenging current practice”, particularly in relation to “procurement methods, historically arranged bundle deals, and anti-change behaviour of operating theatre staff”. “The moment a saving is uncovered in the private sector, it is acted on – providing that it does not involve compromising on product quality or service levels, yet the NHS is throwing away hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, because decision-making is unnecessarily slow. We are not dealing with invasive devices; there is no need to carry out endless theatre trials of this type of product in order to ascertain whether they are fit for purpose.” Although there are still many hospitals that are simply “comfortable using what they have always used”, staff are becoming more aware of the need to make savings, against a back drop of increasing political pressure, she believes. “We are perfectly positioned for such a market, but it still requires challenging the status quo at times. Procurement has radically changed in the last two to three years, which has made it uncomfortable for some clinical staff who have been accustomed to being the sole decision makers in brand selection,” she commented. “In some Trusts, the balance of decision making has shifted to the procurement department, while the NHS is drafting in private sector-based procurement managers who are not interested in the argument that clinicians are ‘comfortable’ with a brand because they have been using it for 10 years. They are there to deliver a result.”