About CareHomeMap

CareHomeMap summarises important information about the quality of care homes in England, that's freely available on the internet, in a way that's easy to access.

CareHomeMap also aims to provide the same information based on the experiences of users of the care homes.

We compiled this information when we were searching for a care home for our own elderly relative. We found that although comprehensive information is available from government inspection reports this was quite difficult to extract, especially when trying to compare one home with another.

For example the Isle of Wight alone has over 100 care homes each of which has an average of seven reports containing 30 pages of information. That's 21,000 pages of information in total.

We're not affiliated to any care home or care organisation and this information is provide in the hope that people will be able to make better decisions about the care of their elderly relatives at what is always a stressful time for everyone involved. We also hope that by making this information available the standards of care will be raised overall.

To read the terms and conditions for using this site please click here

To contact us please email:


Credits

Many thanks to the multi-talented Julian Mosedale for his illustrations, photographs and colour sense. To see more of his work click here: http://www.julianmosedale.co.uk
CareHomeMap uses the excellent open source Google Maps user control for ASP.NET from Shabdar.org.  Source code for this control is available from: http://www.shabdar.org/google-maps-user-control-for-ASP-Net-part1.html
County boundary data comes from nearby.org.uk. It's great that people collect data like this and make it available: http://www.nearby.org.uk
Care Home Rating, Licencing and Outcome information is extracted from reports which are Copyright of the Care Quality Commission. http://www.cqc.org.uk/

Links

Care Homes in Scotland are inspected by the Care Inspectorate: http://www.scswis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7644&Itemid=489
Care Homes in Wales are inspected by Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales (CSSIW): http://www.csiw.wales.gov.uk/dataviewer/index.asp
Care Homes in Northern Ireland are inspected by Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA): http://www.rqia.org.uk/inspections/inspections.cfm

Government Inspections

All Care Homes in England are inspected by a government department called the Care Quality Commission (CQC), previously called the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI).  All homes must be inspected regularly and if the inspection finds problem areas then the home is inspected more frequently.

All of the reports that have ever been produced are available on the Care Quality Commission web site.  The problem is that it's quite difficult to get the information that you need from them quickly in order to make a full assessment or to compare one home with another.

There's full information about the CQC inspection process here: http://www.cqc.org.uk/

How CareHomeMap Works

The CareHomeMap web site uses a database which has been compiled from information held in the reports. The information is presented on a map with the outcome/rating of the homes displayed in different colours.  Once you have located the area on the map that you are interested in by zooming in or by entering a town or postcode you can click on a Care Home and see details about it and graphs of outcomes/ratings since it opened.

If you are only interested in certain types of homes you can choose to limit the display to these types.  If you are interested in a Care Home's outcomes or how it has been rated in a particular category - for example the standard of staffing is more important to you than the environment - you can choose to show this on the map.

Copyright(c) 2009-2012 CareHomeMap