Who Contacts Care Homes?

It is a widely held belief that females play the lead role in organising the care of an elderly relative, so we looked at the data to support this assumption.

We analysed 50,000 care enquiry records over the past 3 years to see which family member plays the most active role in organising the care of an elderly relative.

The pie chart below provides a breakdown of which relation took the lead in 2022. Daughters accounted for the largest proportion of initial contacts at 40% followed by Sons at 17% and then Professionals at 9%.

Nothing unusual about the figures and generally what we would expect, so we thought it would be useful to put this into the context of the last three years to see if this trend is changing. It was...

Daughters still play the largest role in arranging care for their parents, their share is increasing notably year after year. Enquiries from Daughters have seen the biggest increase from 2021 to 2022 (32% to 40%) whilst Sons have received the biggest decrease (22% to 17%).

So what does this mean for the typical care home group?

The core audience still remains the children of those who use homes, however, elderly spouses (8%) making the initial contact, messaging and accessibility of marketing, including websites, need to be considered.

We find that many elderly people lack access to email and prefer telephone or hard-copy communication, especially postal brochures when making their initial enquiries. Ensuring that homes have a good running stock of brochures which can be sent out at request is important.

A simple-to-navigate website is also important, clear telephone numbers and prominent enquiry forms significantly increase engagement rates.

For further insights, or to find out more about our data and what we do, please contact hello@trustedcare.co.uk.