Chiropods was formed by Andy Neve in 1995. Andy is a State registered Chiropodist who from 1982 until 1995 worked for the NHS in West Dorset. At first he worked for West Dorset Health Care District and then over the years of organisational name changes he finally worked for Dorset Community NHS Trust as Professional Head of Podiatry/Chiropody Services.
The Dorset Health Commission asked Jay Vinall to undertake a review of Chiropody Services in Dorset in 1993. The review was instigated as the "Dorset Healthline" (A telephone helpline run by the Health Authority) was receiving a large number of complaints regarding access times to Chiropody services in Dorset.
At that time Dorset was split to the west and east with Dorset Community NHS Trust supplying Chiropody services to Lyme Regis, Dorchester, Sherborne, Shaftesbury, Blandford to Weymouth and Portland and Dorset HealthCare NHS Trust supplied services from Wool, Wareham and Swanage across to Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch.
For the year 1992/3 the two NHS trusts had the following budgets and targets:
| 1992/93 | Budget | Activity Targets | Actual Activity | Variance % | Actual cost per contact |
| Dorset HealthCare NHS Trust | £555,000 | 94,800 | 69,220 | -27% | £8.00 |
| Dorset Community NHS Trust | £237,000 | 31,556 | 30,683 | -3% | £7.72 |
| TOTALS | £792,000 | 126,356 | 99,903 | -21% | £7.93 |
As you can see there was a discrepancy in the targets achieved by each trust with West Dorset nearly acheiving the target and East Dorset were over a quarter down. Added to this problem was the fact that waiting times in East Dorset averaged 6 weeks in 1992/3 whereas in West Dorset the average wait was 2 weeks. All this was achieved in West Dorset with 11.26 wte staff compared to 22.9 wte staff in East Dorset.
The review recommended that a market testing or competitive tender take place for the year 1995/96 with one organisation running chiropody services across all of Dorset. The contract was to last 5 years and the supplier had to undertake to offer chiropody services to each GP practice in Dorset.
Dorset HealthCare NHS Trust won the tender process in late February 1995 at a price that required them to find 9 chiropodists willing to accept voluntary redundancy. The remaining Dorset Community NHS Trust staff transferred their employment to Dorset HealthCare NHS Trust.
The caveat to the proceedings was that some GP fundholders in West Dorset did not wish to change supplier so asked Andy Neve as ex professional head of Chiropody for West Dorset to supply services directly to them. Andy did so and rapidly expanded over the next few years.Since those days in 1995 Andy Neve and "Chiropods" as Andy went on to call his organisation now employ seven State registered chiropodists supplying services to 4 local NHS Trusts and 12 GP practices across Dorset with plans to increase that even further.