Your Mum Needs a Care Home, and You Don't Know Where to Start. Here Is Your Step-by-Step Guide.

When looking for a care home, nobody arrives at this moment feeling ready.

One day you are managing, the next you are sitting at a kitchen table at 11 pm searching "my mum needs a care home, and I don't know where to start", and finding pages that either overwhelm you with options or talk to you like you've never made a difficult decision in your life.

This step-by-step guide to finding a care home in the UK is written for you: the adult child who needs to move forward, needs to get this right, and needs someone to lay out the road ahead in plain language.

Before You Search: Three Things to Get Clear First

Starting with a Google search for care homes is the most common mistake. It produces a list of options before you have the framework to evaluate them, which means you end up visiting homes you should have filtered out and missing homes you should have found. Do these three things before you open a single listing.

1. Understand what level of care your mum actually needs

Care homes are not all the same. A residential care home provides personal care, help with washing, dressing, meals and daily life, but does not provide nursing.

A nursing home has registered nurses on duty and can manage complex medical needs. A dementia specialist home is specifically designed and staffed to support people whose primary diagnosis is dementia, with environments, training, and daily routines built around that condition rather than adapted for it. Getting this wrong at the outset means choosing a home that cannot properly support your mum as her needs change.

If her diagnosis is dementia, you are almost certainly looking for a dementia specialist home, and that distinction matters more than any other filter you will apply.

2. Get a care needs assessment — it changes everything

A care needs assessment is a free, statutory right.

Your mum's GP or local authority social services team can arrange one, and it will formally establish what level of support she needs and what the local authority may contribute to the cost. Many adult children skip this step in the urgency of the moment and end up either overpaying for care they could have had subsidised, or choosing a home that isn't equipped for the level of need the assessment would have clarified.

Request the assessment before you shortlist a single home. It also opens the door to a financial assessment, which establishes whether your mum qualifies for local authority funding, full self-funding, or NHS Continuing Healthcare, a fully funded package that many families never know they may be entitled to.

3. Set a realistic budget — but don't let it close doors prematurely

Care home fees in the UK currently average between £800 and £1,400 per week depending on location, level of care and whether nursing is included.

That range is wide and the variation is real. Before you rule a home in or out on cost, understand what is included in the fee, what is charged as an extra, and whether the home will accept a local authority rate if your mum's savings fall below the threshold in future.

A home that looks affordable today but cannot accommodate a change in funding in three years is not the right long-term choice.

Step-by-Step: How to Find a Care Home for Your Mum in the UK

Step 1 — Build your location criteria, not just a postcode

The instinct is to search within a fixed radius of where you live or where your mum currently lives. That instinct is usually right, but test it.

Proximity to you matters because you will be visiting, advocating, and responding to calls. But proximity to your mum's existing community, her friends, her church, her familiar streets, also matters, because dementia does not erase the comfort of the familiar even when it erodes explicit memory. Think about visiting frequency, travel time, and whether siblings or other family members are involved.

A care home that is twenty minutes further away but easier for three people to reach is often a better practical choice than the nearest option.

Step 2 — Use the right sources to create a longlist

The CQC register lists every regulated care home in England and lets you filter by location, type of care, and rating. Use it to exclude any home rated Inadequate and to flag any with recent enforcement action.

That is what the CQC register is best suited to: filtering out the clearly unsuitable. For everything beyond that, what daily life is actually like, how staff treat residents, whether the home is genuinely a dementia specialist or simply claims to be, you need a second source.

Dementia Care Choices combines CQC inspection data with thousands of verified family reviews and a specialist dementia evidence base to produce a picture of each home that no single regulatory report can provide. Use both: CQC to filter out the unsafe, DCC to compare what remains.

Step 3 — Apply the right comparison criteria

Most people compare care homes on the wrong things: the quality of the brochure, the friendliness of the initial phone call, and the appearance of the reception area.

These things are not irrelevant, but they are not the comparison that matters. The evidence from thousands of family reviews is consistent in what actually determines whether a dementia care home is good: staff warmth and consistency, residents' visible happiness, cleanliness, management quality, meaningful activities and engagement, food, and how the home communicates with family.

These are the eight dimensions to compare across every home on your longlist, and they are the ones most comparison tools fail to surface. A home that scores well on all eight, not just on a CQC domain, is the home worth visiting.

Step 4 — Visit at least three homes, and visit more than once

A single visit during a scheduled tour tells you how a home presents itself. A second visit, either unannounced or at a different time of day, shows how it actually runs.

Go during a mealtime. Go on a weekday afternoon when activities are meant to be happening. Stand in a corridor for a few minutes and watch how staff move, how they speak to residents, whether they make eye contact, and whether they seem rushed or calm. The things that will determine your mum's daily experience, the pace of care, the quality of attention, and the culture of the team, are all visible if you know what to look for.

The care home manager's answers to your questions matter. What happens in the ten minutes when no one thinks you're watching matters more.

Step 5 — Ask the questions that separate good homes from the right home

Take a list of questions and use it on every visit so you can compare answers fairly.

Ask about staffing ratios during morning and evening routines. Ask what proportion of shifts are covered by permanent staff rather than agency workers. Ask what dementia-specific training staff have completed and at what level. Ask how the home finds out about a new resident's life history and how that information shapes their care. Ask what a good day looks like for a resident with your mum's level of need. Ask what happens when something goes wrong and how families are kept informed.

These questions are not aggressive or unreasonable. A genuinely good home will welcome them. A home that becomes defensive or vague has told you something important.

Step 6 — Understand the contract before you sign it

Care home contracts are legally binding documents, and they are not standardised.

Before you sign, check what notice period is required from either side. Check whether fees can be increased and, if so, with what notice. Check what happens to fees if your mum is hospitalised. Check what is included and what will be invoiced separately. Check the process for raising concerns and the home's complaints procedure. If you are uncertain about any clause, a solicitor with experience in care funding and elder law can review the contract; the cost is modest relative to what is at stake.

The Solicitors for the Elderly directory lists practitioners with the relevant specialism.

Step 7 — Plan the move with her, not around her

The transition into a care home is one of the most disorienting experiences a person with dementia can face, and how it is managed significantly affects how well they settle.

Bring familiar objects: photographs, a favourite blanket, the mug she always uses. Where possible, visit the home together before moving day so the environment is not entirely new on the day itself. Agree on a visiting pattern for the first few weeks that is regular and predictable; the routine matters more than the frequency. Expect the first two to four weeks to be hard. Distress, apparent unhappiness, and regression during this period are common and do not necessarily indicate that the choice was wrong.

What you are watching for is a trajectory: things improving slowly, not a perfect start.

What to Do If You're Not Sure the Home Is Working

Six weeks in, most families have a clearer picture. Some have peace of mind. Some have a nagging doubt they cannot fully articulate. If something feels wrong — your mum seems consistently distressed, she is losing weight, staff do not know her name when you arrive unannounced, your calls are not returned, trust that instinct and act on it. Raise concerns in writing with the manager first. If the response is inadequate, escalate to the home's registered provider. If serious concerns remain unresolved, the CQC has a formal process for reporting concerns about a regulated home, and the local authority safeguarding team can be contacted if you believe your mum is at risk.

Changing care homes is possible and sometimes necessary. It is disruptive, and the settling-in process begins again, but a home that is wrong for your mum is more damaging than the disruption of moving to one that is right.

A Summary: Your Step-by-Step Care Home Guide

Step 1: Clarify what level of care your mum needs, residential, nursing, or dementia specialist.

Step 2: Request a care needs assessment and financial assessment from the local authority.

Step 3: Establish a realistic budget and understand future funding scenarios.

Step 4: Build a longlist using CQC to filter out unsafe homes and Dementia Care Choices to compare the rest.

Step 5: Compare homes on the eight dimensions that families actually care about, not just the rating.

Step 6: Visit at least three homes, more than once, at different times of day.

Step 7: Ask the specific questions that reveal how a home actually operates.

Step 8: Review and understand the contract before you sign.

Step 9: Plan the transition carefully, with familiar objects, regular visits and realistic expectations for the first weeks.

Step 10: Review at six weeks and act if something feels wrong.