About Us
Alison Cairns
Director / Clinical lead OT
Alex Cairns
Director / COO
Ace Children’s Occupational Therapy
Ace Children’s Occupational Therapy was formed by Alison Cairns in 2012. A career OT, Alison was working part-time hours in the NHS alongside her private practice. Within the NHS Alison spent the majority of her career experience as a highly specialist grade OT.
The limited company was formed in 2014, as Alison left the NHS, enabling her to focus on developing her business in a full-time capacity.
With the company rapidly expanding, by 2016, some of Alison’s former NHS colleagues joined the Practice on a part-time basis as Associates.
Her husband, Alex Cairns, was on a career break at the time and had the opportunity to support Alison as the demand for her services grew.
Alex had been in consulting his whole career within the IT industry, initially on a technical basis, moving onto global directorships within major multi-nationals and ultimately board-level interim management assignments.
By September 2017, Alex had joined the Business full-time and set about creating the infrastructure to cope with the increasing demand whilst ensuring the same high quality end-user experience. By this stage, Ace were renting community centres and school classrooms to accommodate the growing demand for weekend and school holiday clinic-based assessments and treatment.
Going into 2018, Ace were fortunate to attract more paediatric OTs as the demand continued to grow. The establishment of a clinic and office facility was urgently required; the Clinic at Clare Park Farm opened at the end of August, 2018.
During 2019, as demand grew exponentially, a permanent staff base of further OTs and Back Office was established. It was during this year that Ace started delivering Legal Tribunal Assessments, sometimes representing clients in the High Court; this naturally led to the further development of services supporting young people up to the age of 25.
Having the Clinic facility also enabled Ace to start taking OT students on placement. Alison had previously been the clinical coordinator for her NHS team and wanted to continue to offer a teaching role to pre-registration practitioners. We have offered placements to final year students only on BSc and MSc courses.
As 2019 drew to a close, there was recognition that delivering their portfolio of services at school, home or Clinic could still not sustain the demand, so Ace started developing the collateral and technical infrastructure to deliver online services for: assessments, treatment and education.
The online services were scheduled for launch after Easter 2020. However, the Covid-19 Lockdown entailed rolling out the new services a month early.
Ace were fortunate to migrate almost their entire portfolio of clients to online services within 4 weeks and were granted authorisation to deliver EHCP and Tribunal assessments using video evidenced gained during online assessments.
The online services offering quickly gained traction and enquiries started coming in from further afield including Northern Ireland and Italy.
Coming out of Lockdown, Ace re-structured the Practice again to enable the extended portfolio of services to continue. Significant investment was also made supporting an improved end-user experience and quality of reporting to satisfy the demands of their increased range of services.
