A SUNDERLAND healthcare company is focusing on winning European orders as it expands into new premises, where it will start manufacturing its own products.

Lynch Healthcare, which supplies and installs equipment to help with the moving, handling and bathing of elderly and disabled patients, plans to start making products from its new base at Sunderland Enterprise Park.

The company currently has a list of customers across the region ranging from private individuals and care homes to NHS trusts, which it supplies with items including shower chairs, bathing systems, ceiling track hoists and slings. And managing director David Lynch, who set up the business 21 months ago, has ambitious plans to boost turnover to £1m next year. Lynch Healthcare, which employs four people, had sales of £260,000 in its first 12 months and is on course to hit £500,000 at its second year-end in April.

Mr Lynch said he hoped turnover would rise “dramatically” once the company started manufacturing its own products and then started reaching outside of its current North East market.

He said: “We are expanding into the Yorkshire area – a little bit by default because some of our customers have moved down there.

“And we are working with UK Trade & Investment for Passport to Export, when we start making our own products.”

The company will initially target nationwide sales and then look to expand into the Netherlands and Germany.

Lynch set up the company with technical director David Giles, with whom he worked before they decided to open Lynch Healthcare.

“We’ve always had it in our mind [to manufacture],” said Lynch. “My business partner David Giles has a design background.

“We were constantly frustrated by suppliers when we worked together before.

“We would do our best for the customers but we were let down. We now have a few ideas of how the products could be better.”

The business is now looking to recruit an extra pair of hands via Newcastle University’s internship scheme, to help it cope with the expected growth in business and is aiming to expand the e-commerce side.

Further recruitment is expected once the in-house manufacturing starts.

Lynch and Giles took Business Link’s development programme to look at how to grow the company.