A report published on Tuesday 27 February by UK regulator, the Care Quality Commission, found that choosing an adult social care home for a loved one is ‘one of life’s most stressful experiences’. Having good sources of information to support decisions were also found to reduce this stress.

Carehomeadvisor.com offers a reliable, objective and free-to-use source of information that consumers can turn to when they need to find out which care homes in their area provide the best quality care.

CareHomeAdvisor aggregates quality performance data on individual care homes in real-time via Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from independent sources, including The Care Quality Commission (CQC), The Food Standards Agency (FSA), NHS Choices and Ipsos MORI’s independent customer satisfaction survey Your Care Rating (YCR).

These sources are then combined with LaingBuisson’s proprietary survey data and each care home is awarded a unique star rating and a score out of 100. Because everything is updated in real time, if a care home’s rating from one of these sources changes, e.g. a care home’s CQC assessment is updated, the score on CareHomeAdvisor will change immediately to reflect this.

Consumers can search the site on the basis of town, county, local authority and also the name of a specific home. This draws up a list of homes in the locality that they are interested in, with those with the highest score and star rating ranked highest. Consumers can also filter their search on the basis of service (i.e. is it a nursing home or a residential care home) and by specialisation (i.e. older people, dementia, mental health, physical disability, etc.). While nothing is quite as good as seeing the care home for yourself, this allows the consumer to draw up a shortlist of homes to choose from based on objective, impartial advice.

LaingBuisson were approached last year by Emma Challans, Deputy Chief Operating Officer of a leading NHS Foundation Trust, with the idea and she became the Consumer Champion and Ambassador for CareHomeAdvisor. She said,
“I was disappointed by the lack of impartial information and in particular, the lack of it being all in one place to allow people to make informed choices about which care home would be most suitable for their loved one. Working with LaingBuisson, we have been able to develop this unique idea and as the recent CQC report shows, having good, clear advice about the quality of care is key to them making a good decision at what is a very difficult time for most people. CareHomeAdvisor is a truly remarkable, simple and user-friendly aid for consumers.”
CEO of LaingBuisson, Henry Elphick said,
“We wanted to develop something that was as arms-length and as objective as possible and that approach means we have the broad support of Age UK, Independent Age, Your Care Rating and Care England. It was also important for us, as a company, to develop a service in keeping with our reputation for the provision of authoritative market intelligence and data.”

 

Download the press release as a PDF