Cruise ship entertainers to hone young doctors' bedside skills

The Skipton-based family firm, which was set up 11 years ago and has since worked with cruise and holiday companies Fred Olsen, First Choice and Thomson, will provide simulated patients for practice medical exams for students at Plymouth University.

Peel expects the three-year contract, which covers about 800 sessions each year, to provide work for several hundred actors. The new brand, Peel Patients, will recruit and train actors and can draw on their existing database to find the right people.

The business also hopes to win more role-play work in areas such as the law, where trainee barristers act out court cases.

Susannah Daley, who runs Peel with her mother, Mollie, and sister, Kerry, said of the medical deal: "They become a patient and are given a scenario devised with the university. The trainee doctor has to get the information out of them.

"Generally, it will be more like a patient history than an accident victim. It could be someone with heart disease who comes in with a headache and the medics have to ask the right questions.

"They could miss the information and give them a pill for a headache. They want to give the doctors the communication skills as well as the knowledge skills."

Ms Daley, managing director, said the idea to move into medical role plays came after suggestions from actors.

"We now have so many actors on our books this would be a good way of keeping them in work and honing their skills."

The move into the medical sector is Peel's second significant innovation of the year. This summer, it put on its first weekend event, at a country house in Scotland.

The luxury house party-style event, at Aldourie Castle, on the banks of Loch Ness, featured broadcaster and Eats, Shoots and Leaves author Lynne Truss and saw guests spend three nights in the Highlands at a cost of 1,650. Ms Daley said the event was a success and now Peel, which has 22 full-timestaff at its Broughton Hall offices, hopes to put on similar events in future.

"I was nervous about getting people together but it went so much better than expected. The guests effectively become the owners of the hotel for the weekend – it is not a hotel experience so much as a house party."

Peel, which turns over 6m a year, expects to put on five more house parties next year. Ms Daley said they were still considering the identity of speakers, who could be figures from the worlds of literature, history, gardening or cookery, but they wanted to keep the focus of the weekend on their house, rather than purely on the experts.

Peel's entertainments arm, which has 300 performers on its books, has staged shows which are intended to be more stimulating than some of the acts traditionally associated with holiday companies.

Its cruise ship entertainment programme grew because Peel put on a different show every night, which was virtually unheard of at the time, offering workshops and plays throughout the day and taking performers onshore when travellers went on excursions.

It has also worked with Warner, a mid-to-upmarket hotel and short-break company which caters solely for adults, at venues like Thoresby Hall Hotel and Spa, in Nottinghamshire, where Peel is resident entertainment company.

Mrs Daley said Peel's acts are geared towards two audiences – one in their forties and fifties and another of those in their seventies – but said such people "don't see themselves as old".

Susannah Daley

Peel was set up in 1999 but Susannah Daley's theatrical roots go back further.

At 12, she won the BBC Young Playwright of the Year competition for a Where Do We Go From Here?, which was set in Heaven and about poverty and children.

Three years later, after she helped to make a film about the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, she became one of the BBC's Young Filmmakers of the Year.

Ms Daley, a mother-of-one, set up the Daley Partnership with her mother in 1993, putting on performances at various tourist destinations. She was later asked to pitch for the First Choice Cruise entertainment contract and Peel was founded.