Letter from our CEO Village

Life at Faircape

The last time I had the privilege of writing a piece for our magazine the uncertainty of COVID still hung over us. Life has certainly moved on dramatically since those uncertain times and we are almost back at pre-covid activity levels. I look back at the early days of the COVID pandemic and we owe a large debt of gratitude to all our staff who mostly braved the public transport risks, wore their stifling PPE and carried on with their daily work. They were exposed to the virus, which in the beginning we didn't know too much about, no working from home for them. What would we ever have done without their dedication to duty and responsibility, where they realised that our vulnerable residents would be at risk without them. How can we thank them enough?

The Faircape. group has grown to over 700 employees. We have systematically replaced outsourced services with our own brand-aligned staff and have employed our own managers to manage these new staff. Our latest change has been replacing outsourced gardeners with our own teams of groundsmen reporting to our newly appointed supervisors.

Wherever we have made these changes we have had overwhelmingly positive responses from the village residents. We made similar changes some years ago with our housekeepers and expanded the housekeeping services to the village residents. We have had great reviews and as the housekeepers go through their upgraded skills training we expect to be able to offer increasingly better service to our residents.

We are the only retirement group in South Africa who have a healthcare centre in each village. We have 350 health care rooms across the 6 villages with subacute rehabilitation licenses for 60 of these rooms. Subacute is offered mostly in Tokai with availability to residents of other villages. We are the only healthcare group that makes use of an elaborate state of the art camera network that allows us to monitor risk, safety and staff. We are one of the only (if not the only) healthcare group that employs a structured set of allied and brand-aligned professionals. We have just employed an additional social worker under the management of our group social worker, which brings this professional team to four. We have an occupational therapist in each village under the management of our group occupational therapist bringing our team complement to seven. In addition, we have a group dietician, We have excellent additional inputs from the doctors/physicians practice, Occupational therapists and Physiotherapists practicebased in Tokai. We have our own Pharmacy managed by two pharmacists and an assistant, and an X-Ray unit including our own state-of-the-art X-ray machine which is managed by our own radiographer under the direction of Morton and Partners. We are achieving 98% of our Tokai health care residents giving us a 5 star rating. This striving for excellence is what pervades our whole health team, whether long or short-term. We attract professionals who are wanting to be part of the Multi Disciplinary Team which is unique to our group. We know that by having the large number different professionals, we can afford to install the best systems and ensure we embrace the best training techniques.

There are a number of additional initiatives that we are currently undertaking to ensure we offer the very best care to our residents so that when you need healthcare or medical help, there will no better place to be than in a Faircape Health facility

Our AGM's have all been completed and all went well. The most difficult part of any AGM in a normal body corporate or association is the management and explanation of the financial aspects. All of our villages operate on the fixed levy basis where any levy shortfalls and capital infrastructure requirements are met by Faircape/Old Mutual. We have never in our history asked for a special levy, as a significant aspect of our village sales offering is financial stability. It is for this reason that most of the financial aspects of managing the village are delegated to Farcape/Old Mutual in the Body Corporate rules. These aspects together with other day to day management aspects are delegated to Faircape/Old Mutual through one of its subsidiaries so that professional managers can deal with these matters, allowing trustees to get on with matters that affect village life and well-being. We have appointed competent managers to interface with residents and deal with their concerns. We have an escalation procedure to allow for residents who feel that their voices are not heard to escalate their concerns. I am looking forward to meeting with the trustees in the coming weeks to discuss the upcoming year.

All our villages are in demand. In a group of almost 1000 homes, we often have fewer than 10 for sale across all villages We believe that this is as a result of all of us working towards the same goal of making the Faircape Life Villages the best place to be in your post 50 year old life. Thank you to all our staff and residents.

Yours Sincerely,