Ordinary life, nearby

careplaces is information about help to live with illness and disability, where you live.

Behind the scenes, careplaces is a warehouse of geographical information, which updates and grows continuously as it learns about people who need care and the support systems around them.

There are three ways to use careplaces.

  1. Explore neighbourhood caremaps, which are live, searchable and easy to use
  2. Study ready-made graphs and charts that summarise important information about a neighbourhood
  3. Query data in the careplaces warehouse for deep understanding about local care systems

careplaces has applications for
citizens who live with illness and disability, and people who care for them
professionals in health and care
commissioners in local authorities and the NHS
providers of care and investors


Citizen Careplaces

For people who live with disability and illness, and people who care for them, caremaps is the simplest way to look for help near home.

A careplace can be a neighbourhood, a town or even a commute, which you can define by travel time or distance from home in a caremap.

You can tell caremaps the size and shape of the place you want to know about, from a street to a city or any place you can draw on a map.

You can look for general services that know how to help with illness and disability. For example, you can find local shops that deliver, restaurants that accommodate limited mobility and dementia, and wheelchair-accessible taxis. There is much more information that you will not find in search engines or even in specialist care search applications.

If you need formal services, like personal care, help around the home or a local nursing home, caremaps will help you find it. You can see results inspections by the Care Quality Commission in England and the Care Inspectorate in Scotland; estimated prices and availability. Caremaps show all this information on a simple map of any place you choose.

Professional Careplaces

Health and care professionals can use caremaps to quickly match a customer's needs to care, disability-friendly businesses, charities and support groups near their home.

We know health and care professionals do this all the time, but the information at hand is often fragmented and partial. Even the best Internet search engines omit much of what matters to people who live with illness and disability; and they will never find information that is private or commercial.

careplaces for professionals is secure, fast, accurate, complete and current. It contains all the information in Citizen Careplaces, with more detail about the specialisms of local care providers; details from regulators' quality inspections; financial health.

careplaces complies with GDPR. Local authorities and health services can safely add data about the people whose care they arrange. This helps professionals find opportunities to coordinate peer support groups of people in the same neighbourhood who need the same service. It also helps connect people who just share interests and need help to pursue them together.

Commissioner Careplaces

careplaces is a geographical warehouse of social and economic data. It contains a billion datapoints about 43 million locations in the UK, from 150 public and proprietary datasets. It continues to grow.

Commissioner Careplaces combines features of a Joint Strategic Assessment and a Market Position Statement in live, searchable, interactive maps that are enriched with explanatory charts, indicators and explanations. It contains proprietary data that are not usual in JSA and MPSs.

Example: estimate neighbourhood demand for funded care

Local demand for state-funded social care for older people can be predicted from demography, wealth and the work of unpaid carers. careplaces measures these factors in populations of about 700 people using compounds of data, among them

  • the age of a local population
  • home ownership, property values, tenure-types and debt-incumbrance
  • rates of Pension Credit and benefits for illness, disability and unpaid care
  • hours of unpaid care

Commissioners can use neighbourhood demand estimates for hyperlocal planning.

Provider Careplaces

Provider Careplaces helps investors and care providers find new markets. It works on similar principles to Commissioner Careplaces, with extra insight into the workforce, competitive landscape, local authority fees and people who fund their own care.

Provider careplaces includes information to help you identify suitable sites for new care homes, including catchment areas, local demographics, consumer classifications, demand and supply data, housing assets, and live updates on planning applications. Our data about local labour markets can help you find the right people to work in your new care home.

Example: find opportunity where care is scarce

People have to wait for care services when demand for care exceeds supply. The causes vary widely from place to place. Scarcity is explained by combinations of factors including population density; local authority fee-rates; the proximity of formal care providers; numbers of local residents seeking work; the health of the local population; and the strength of informal support networks. Even the incidence and perceptions of crime can affect the supply of care in a neighbourhood.

careplaces uses these factors to find places where care is scarce, and the causes of scarcity. It can help you find opportunities to open new services.

What makes careplaces different?

Internet search engines and many proprietary care search tools find only a fraction of the factors that make care markets work. Their results are incomplete because much of the information needed to understand care markets is not published on the Internet. The information that is available is often provided by organisations with a vested interest in sharing it.

For example, care services advertise on the Internet to generate business and welcome the custom it generates. Their service, close to home and good as it is, might not be what a customer needs. It is not controversial to say that people often move to care homes too early, and for the wrong reasons, because that's an obvious solution in a moment of crisis, for example, after a spell in hospital. With better information about other options, they might have gone home from hospital and lived safely and independently for longer.

What people need often doesn't show up in search engines nor in proprietary care search services. This is especially true for people arranging their own care. In times of stretched local authority resources, even social workers struggle to find the information they need to help people live well at home.

careplaces is a single repository of information about help to live with disability and illness in every neighbourhood.

careplaces is unbiased because it is not influenced by the goals of any one organisation. It is designed to make the care and support work better for everyone.

Where did careplaces begin?

careplaces began in Gloucestershire, where we helped the Council develop hyperlocal commissioning. Our models, and extensive work with home care providers, showed that commissioning home care in small "lower-layer super output areas," with populations of about 2000 people, would create a pricing structure that the Council could afford and that would stimulate supply where people waited too long for care.

Hyperlocal Commissioning helped Gloucestershire County Council double the number of older people it helps to live at home in less than three years.

Our experience in Gloucestershire showed that hyperlocal health and care is transformative. You can read more about careplaces in Gloucestershire's home care strategy in our Intelligence Case Studies.

See careplaces

We are developing a self-service demonstration of careplaces for autumn 2025. Follow developments at careplaces.ai

If you have questions in the meantime, or you would like a preview, please get in touch.