The chief executive of Healthcare Locums (HCL) says the £60m refinancing deal agreed by shareholders in September is a huge opportunity for the company to put the past behind it and to take the company in a new direction.

Stephen Burke, who took up his new position in May, told Recruiter: “The refinancing allows us to invest in the future, to meet the numbers that the City expects, but equally to make the investment, and upgrade the systems, and strengthen certain parts of the business in terms of people. It allows us to move the business forward organically from that base.”

Burke said the refinancing would help HCL to improve its internal processes and procedures. For example, because HCL had grown by acquisition the various parts of the company didn’t all share the same database. As a result of the refinancing, Burke said that £4m had been pencilled in for IT over the next few years.

Burke said that during 2011 the company had begun an “enormous investment” to improve HCL’s compliance regime for NHS locums. “It’s key because the sooner we get there, the better the flow of compliant locums we have. While our procedures aren’t firing on all cylinders we will have lower volumes of compliant locums so we will have lower success rates.”

Burke said that in the past HCL’s focus on largely entering into non-framework contracts, even after the NHS introduced more framework agreements, had left it without a sufficiently large pool of compliant contractors. “Unless you make that investment and bring your locums into a complaint situation you cannot maximise the opportunities through frameworks,” he said.

Burke accepted that HCL had been through “a challenging period”, following the discovery of “serious accounting irregularities”, the departure of HCL founder and executive vice chairman Kate Bleasdale and the suspension in January of HCL shares. Trading resumed in September. HCL was also recently forced to restate its 2009 accounts.

Earlier this year, HCL admitted that it repaid Birmingham Cluster NHS Trust £200,000 after administrative errors in its invoice processing. “It’s a total hands-up on that one, it shouldn’t have happened,” said Burke.

However, Burke said that damage to HCL was “more optical than real”. He said the company remained “a strong supplier” to the NHS, while its Australian business, which contributes about 50% of net fee income, was performing well. As far as he was aware, during all the turmoil, the company had not lost any contracts.

Following the refinancing when the company issued 600m new shares, last week HCL shares were trading at around 6p, compared to 138p in October 2010. “Shareholders have lost a huge amount of value,” accepted Burke.

“The question is what the share price should have been before the suspension.”