It is often claimed that there are no advantages to be gained from being an international operator. What rubbish!  Our interview with Prof Oehlinger, chief executive at SeneCura, the Austrian/Swiss (and soon Czech) nursing home/assisted living operator, shows that this is so much tosh.

On the contrary, being international has given SeneCura a much wider vision of what is possible. It has successfully exported the Swiss assisted living model where the elderly enjoy the pleasures of their own apartment coupled to security, and a lot of communal fun, to Austria. Austrian assisted living places are set to double from 750 to 1,500 in the next two years. Oehlinger is now experimenting with moving both the Swiss assisted living model and the Austrian nursing home model to the Czech Republic. Meanwhile Senecura's Austrian nursing home model is to be exported to Switzerland where many infirm elderly languish in expensive acute wards.

Of course, business models can not be imported willy-nilly. Oehlinger points out, for instance, that the luxurious Swiss assisted living model has had to be adapted to the much more limited budgets of the average Austrian.

Above all, the operator has to be a cross between an anthropologist and a historian to get international right. Oehlinger for instance, has spent a lot of time carefully assessing and understanding how East European countries differ. He differentiates between agrarian and Catholic countries, like Hungary, where families care for the elderly and industrialised societies, such as the Czech Republic, where individuals are much more egocentric.

This egocentricity (plus the hangover from communism) means that building a service culture focused on the customer is very difficult in the Czech Republic. This, Oehlinger concedes, is the biggest barrier he has to climb. He plans to bring back to the Czech Republic hundreds of Czech nurses who have spent years working for SeneCura in Austria and so are imbued with the service culture.

Too often, operators fail to understand these cultural differences. Disaster then ensues. Take US operator Sunrise. It assumed that elderly Germans would, like their US counterparts, be happy with very small apartments. In fact, to Germans of that generation, spacious accomodation is prized. Sunrise also completely screwed up pricing and marketing.

But such failures should not be allowed to block international innovation. Looking elsewhere is essential for anyone who wants to understand what is truely possible and who wants to question the status quo. As a Brit it is only when I looked at service levels and the sense of vocation in French care homes that I realised just how poor the nursing culture is in the UK.