Founders of Greencare

The modular Greencare wheelchair is the brainchild of one of the leading designers of manual wheelchairs in the world – David Batty. Few people could have designed wheelchairs with greater numbers of users over the past 30 years than David. David was trained as an engineer and honed his skills in a career of nearly half a century. Having spent most of his time before Greencare at Remploy Healthcare he was not only responsible for the company’s huge output of 8L’s and 9L’s he designed the Access and the hugely successful Stowaway.

David had developed a close working relationship over nearly 15 years with Greentyre’s founder and serial inventor Colin Scarsi and in 2005 David persuaded Colin to invest in creating a highly configurable wheelchair that is the prescription Greencare wheelchair used in the NHS today and exported.

David’s concept was simple; modular components that could be individually put together to meet a user’s needs and yet still remain sufficiently configurable to give 50mm of adjustment at time of handover.

The design was also strong enough to take clients up to 200KG which make the largest Greencare the lightest wheelchair in its class in the world.

With perhaps as many as 36,000 chairs in daily use David can proudly boast that his chairs are now in use not only in the UK but in 7 countries and that includes exports to China. Coals to Newcastle indeed! David retired from full time work with the company in 2015 and is now non-executive Technical Director.

Greencare continue to grow within the Greentyre family of companies and are using the modularity in their wheelchairs design to work with enlightened wheelchair providers in offering users a wheelchair in a single visit to a hospital or service centre thereby eliminating the frustrating multiple appointments and delays many patients experience when seeking wheelchair provision.

The company have, in 2016, introduced a lightweight highly manoeuvrable power chair into their range.