This week, we’re handing over the blog to The Oxygen Works, who provide life-changing support to people with a wide range of conditions. They’re excited to announce their first ever black tie event, the Spring Swing, celebrating everything and everyone TOW while supporting a very worthwhile cause.
Read below to hear from Jenni Donnelly, and find out more about The Oxygen Works, their post-pandemic successes, and what the future holds.
About The Oxygen Works
The Oxygen Works, previously known as the MS Therapy Centre, has been here on Burnett Road for nearly 32 years. Providing Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and other holistic therapies to people who live with a wide range of conditions, we are proud to serve the community of the Highlands and Islands and to see so many people benefit from our facilities from all over Scotland.
As with a lot of businesses, we had to close immediately during the pandemic of 2020. As a completely self funded charity this obviously had a huge effect on our finances and more importantly our clients health and wellbeing. When we finally, tentatively re-opened, we were then hit with a huge flood from a burst pipe within our centre. This resulted in a further nine month closure which again was incredibly difficult for our clients and team. We now, however, look at this time through a very positive lens. We have a fully refurbished centre and have adapted our business model completely, which has enabled us to collaborate with incredible other organisations, such as Move4ward. We can offer a range of services all under one roof that will benefit our clients and the wider community of the Highlands and Islands.
Meet The Team
I am the General Manager here at The Oxygen Works and incredibly proud to be so. I came to the centre from a commercial background 2 years ago and have never looked back. Being able to work in such a professional yet caring environment alongside an incredibly inspirational CEO in Leigh-Ann and a hard working, dedicated team in Nichola, Kasia and Grahame.
As a very small but mighty team of five staff members, we have to work very hard to get The Oxygen Works name out into the public domain. Although we see over 150 clients per week there are so many more people who could benefit from our services.
A View To The Next 12 Months
We were privileged to be the nominated charity for the Highland Business Dinner in 2023 and we saw how beneficial this was in terms of raising awareness of our charity and the services we provide. We’re still seeing the benefits of that now and have since organised our own black tie event which will take place in June 2024. We are hopeful that the chamber and affiliated organisations will be able to support in some way.
We were also recently successful in our application for The Scottish Enterprise Awards. This is another great step in our journey in raising awareness of the Oxygen Works.
We will be expanding our services early in 2024 with the addition of various services including Theraplate. We also plan to go mobile following the acquisition of our tensile, soft shell chamber. We consider ourselves to be an ever evolving organisation and are always looking for new challenges and ways to support people who may not be able to make it into the centre of Inverness. Through collaborative working we will continue to move forward with our renewed business strategy.
Chamber Connections
Being part of ICC brings a definite feeling of togetherness and support. We have already committed, as a management team, to attending more of the networking events in 2024 to build on and cement the relationships that we have formed as being part of ICC. At TOW we value the benefits that collaborative working brings especially with the geographical spread of our clients.
We value all our relationships that we have made within the chamber and having found that the networking events are really effective we will definitely be attending more. These events are a good springboard to start a conversation that you can then continue in more depth at a suitable time. An example of this is when we connected with a local business at a networking lunch which then went on to a two hour meeting here at the centre!
I would thoroughly recommend that people take the opportunity to attend the networking events and especially the Spotlight event which is held in September. We found that incredibly valuable in terms of having the ability to capture many businesses in one place.
A Date For Your Diary!
Apart from our core services that run daily, and that we are increasing in 2024, we are extremely excited to announce our first ever black tie event which we have named the Spring Swing! This will take place at the Kingsmills Hotel on 7th June 2024. We know this will be a fantastic night of entertainment, music and celebration of everything and everyone TOW. We encourage all local businesses to come along and bring their teams, friends, partners and to have a fun, entertaining night whilst supporting our very worthy cause!