Live-in care is the option most families do not realise exists until someone tells them. A trained carer lives in your home, sleeps in a spare room, and is there throughout the day for whatever the day requires. The routine stays yours: the same bed, the same garden, the same cat, the same time for the crossword.
It is the closest thing there is to the level of cover a care home provides, delivered without anyone having to leave home to get it.
How the placement pattern works
Carers work in placements — typically two weeks on, two weeks off — with a proper handover between them so the second carer arrives already knowing how the household runs.
Every live-in carer is entitled to a break of around two hours each day. That is covered by a visiting carer, a family member or a neighbour, agreed at the assessment rather than left to work itself out. A carer who never gets their break stops being a good carer within a fortnight, so this part matters more than it sounds.
We aim to keep the same two carers rotating for as long as a placement runs. Continuity is the whole point; a stream of unfamiliar people in your house defeats it.
What a live-in carer does
The work is whatever the household needs rather than a fixed list of tasks. In practice it usually covers personal care — washing, dressing, help to the toilet, continence support — alongside medication prompting or administration, cooking, laundry, shopping, keeping the house in order and getting out to appointments.
Just as importantly, it covers company. Someone is there for the long afternoon and the evening, which is the part of the day family carers most often describe as the hardest.
Live-in carers do not do heavy domestic work, nursing tasks they are not trained for, or anything that needs two people to be done safely. Where a package needs two carers, we will say so.
What it costs compared with a care home
Live-in care is usually comparable to a residential placement for one person, and frequently cheaper for a couple — because you are paying for one carer rather than two rooms.
The house also stays in the picture. Its running costs continue, but it is not normally sold to fund the care, and it remains the family's.
We will give you the weekly figure in writing before anything is arranged, including what changes at weekends and bank holidays. If the honest answer is that visiting care three times a day would serve you better and cost less, we would rather tell you that at the assessment than six months in.
Where it tends to be the right answer
Live-in care suits people who want to stay put and need more than visits can reasonably deliver: someone whose needs are unpredictable through the day, someone who is unsafe alone, a couple who want to stay together when one has become considerably more dependent than the other, or someone coming out of hospital who needs intensive support for a spell rather than forever.
It also works well as a bridge. Some placements last years; others run for six weeks while somebody recovers and then stop.
Getting started
The assessment happens in your home and takes about an hour. We look at the practical things — is there a spare room, where does the carer eat, what does a normal day look like — and the care things, and then tell you what we think is needed.
Live-in placements can usually start within a few days, and faster where somebody is waiting in a hospital bed.
