Caremark

Caremark: home care across the UK since 2005

Caremark is a British home care company that provides care in the home for people from all walks of life, enabling them to remain in their own home and community. The company states that it cares for more than 8,000 customers throughout the UK and delivers over 110,000 hours of home care each week. Its head office is in Worthing, West Sussex, and the network operates through franchise offices that, according to the company, are independently owned and operated.

Caremark was founded in 2005 by the late Kevin Lewis, who had worked in care since 1987. The company is now led by David Glover and Lisa Fyfe. Its stated mission is to provide home care to everyone, regardless of age, race, religion, gender or social standing.

Domiciliary care and live-in support

The core of the offer is personalised home care and live-in care, tailored to the individual customer. Caremark describes its approach as building an individual care plan for each person, on the premise that each customer is unique. The service is delivered by care assistants who visit customers at home.

Among the general home care services listed are:

• Companionship care
• Live-in care
• Personal care
• Respite care
• Overnight care

Specialist and complex care

Beyond general domiciliary support, Caremark sets out a specialist care line that includes Alzheimer's and dementia care, arthritis care, assisted living, bariatric care and cancer care. A further complex care category covers brain injury care, autism care and support, support for challenging behaviours, complex epilepsy support and oxygen therapy care.

Who the service is for

The company groups its customers into elderly care, adults, children and young people, people with learning disabilities, people with physical difficulties, people with specialist needs, and end-of-life and palliative care. This segmentation runs alongside the specialist and complex care categories described above.

How Caremark describes its model

Caremark presents several features as central to how it works. It states that care plans are personalised, that staff are recruited partly on the basis of personality and described as caring, compassionate, cheery and fun, and that it invests time in matching care assistants with customers and maintaining that pairing. It also says it is open and transparent with family members and shares details of each visit when requested, and that it complies with GDPR and data protection rules regarding customer confidentiality.

The company frames its standards as exemplary and describes its values as professional, safe, caring, fun, joyful and cheery, unchanged since its founding in 2005.

Community and charity work

Caremark sponsors the charity Canine Partners, which trains dogs to assist adults with physical disabilities. The company states that it donates £10,000 a year to its sponsored charity with the aim of funding the training of more assistance dogs. It also runs a Carebark initiative promoting the link between having a pet and physical and mental well-being.

Working and partnering with Caremark

Caremark recruits care assistants, presenting flexible hours and full training as part of the offer, and frames care work as a career change. Separately, the company offers franchise opportunities for people who want to run their own Caremark office; the site notes that each franchise office is independently owned and operated.