Ordinary life, nearby

careplaces is local information about help with illness and disability.

Behind the scenes, careplaces is an atlas of health and care, 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 are 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 nor even in specialist care search applications.

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

Professional Careplaces

Health and care professionals can use careplaces for asset-based support planning. Caremaps match a customer's needs to care services, disability-friendly businesses, charities and support groups near their home.

We know health and care professionals do asset-based planning all the time, but the information at hand is fragmented and partial. Even the best Internet search engines omit much of what matters to people who live with illness and disability.

careplaces for professionals is secure, fast, accurate, complete and current. It complies with GDPR. It contains all the information in Citizen Careplaces, with more detail about the quality and specialisms of local care providers; details from regulators' quality inspections; and information about local support groups, charities and disability-friendly businesses.

Commissioner Careplaces

careplaces is a geographical warehouse of social and economic data. It contains five billion datapoints at 47 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 and explanations. It contains proprietary data that are not usual in JSA and MPSs.

Estimate neighbourhood demand for funded care

Local demand for state-funded social care for older people can be predicted by demography, wealth and the work of unpaid carers. careplaces measures these factors in populations of about 2000 people using compounds of data, among them

  • the age and sex of a local population, now and in the future
  • home ownership, property values, tenure-types and debt-incumbrance
  • rates of Pension Credit and benefits for illness, disability and unpaid care
  • disease-prevalence
  • incidence of emergency care
  • care provider density and capacity
  • 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 local workforce, competitive landscape, local authority fees, consumer types and people who fund their own care.

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 income and assets of local residents; the density of local care providers; the health of the population; and the strength of informal support networks. Even the incidence and perceptions of crime can affect the supply of care in a neighbourhood.

Provider careplaces includes information to help you identify suitable sites for new services, including catchment areas, local demographics, consumer classifications, demand and supply data and housing assets. Our data about local labour markets can help you plan recruitment.

careplaces uses these factors to find places where care is scarce and the opportunity to invest in new services.

Why careplaces?

Internet search engines and many proprietary care search tools find only a fraction of the factors that make care 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.

Partial, incomplete information makes care markets inefficient.

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

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