My Care Journey: Your Personal Decision Dashboard
Disclaimer: This feature is currently in development and open to input from families like yours. We're building this based on what hundreds of families have told us they actually need, not what we think sounds good. If you have suggestions or would like to view progress to date, please register and log in.
Finding the right care for someone with dementia isn't a simple search problem. It's a multi-stage decision process that unfolds over weeks, months, and years. It can involve multiple family members, require tracking dozens of variables across competing options, and demand that you make one of the most important decisions of your life while you're probably exhausted, stressed, and short on time.
Most families attempt this using a combination of browser bookmarks, scattered screenshots, half-remembered phone conversations, hastily scribbled notes, Excel spreadsheets they can't share properly, and urgent WhatsApp threads with siblings who may or may not be reading them. This isn't a system. It's controlled chaos at best, and at worst it leads to poor decisions made under pressure with incomplete information.
My Care Journey attempts to solve this problem by giving you a single, centralised, systematic workspace where everything you need to track, compare, evaluate, and decide lives in one place. Think of it as your personal mission control for the entire care search, selection, and management process.
What It Actually Does
When you log into your account, My Care Journey becomes your private workspace for managing every aspect of your care search. You're not just building a list of care homes or home care providers. You're building a complete decision framework that helps you move from "I don't know where to start" to "I'm confident in this choice" without the usual panic and second-guessing.
Your Care Candidates section replaces the traditional "shortlist" with something more useful. Every care home or home care professional you're seriously considering gets added here, but instead of just being a list of names, each entry becomes a living file. You can add private notes after phone calls or visits. You can track when you contacted them and what they said. You can upload photos from your visit that you don't want to share publicly but need to remember later. You can score them against your own criteria and see how they compare side by side.
The benchmark assessment you completed when you first arrived at the site doesn't just disappear into the ether. It saves to your account and updates as your situation evolves. As you learn more about what's available, what things cost, and what you should actually be looking for, your benchmark results adjust to show you where you stand now versus where you started. This matters because most families don't know what they don't know at the beginning, and having a way to track how your understanding has evolved helps prevent you from making decisions based on outdated assumptions.
Search alerts mean you're not constantly checking back to see if new options have appeared that match your criteria. Once you've saved your search parameters, the system monitors for you. If a new care home opens in your target area with dementia specialization? You'll know. Home care professional with the specific qualifications you need becomes available? You'll get notified. This shifts you from reactive searching to proactive monitoring.
The decision matrix gives you a structured way to compare options across the factors that matter to you specifically. Not generic star ratings or averaged reviews, but your own weighted scoring on the things your family cares about. Some families prioritize proximity above almost everything else. Others need specific dementia expertise or particular activities programs. The system lets you define what matters and score each option accordingly, then shows you the results in a way that actually helps you decide rather than just giving you more data to interpret.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
The average family looking for dementia care visits between three and seven properties before making a decision. They speak with dozens of people. They collect hundreds of data points. They're trying to evaluate options across multiple dimensions including cost, quality, location, specialization, availability, staff expertise, facilities, and gut feeling about whether Mum would actually be happy there.
Without a systematic way to capture and compare all this information, what typically happens is that the decision gets made based on whichever home you saw most recently, or whichever salesperson was most persuasive, or simply which option causes the least conflict among family members. These aren't necessarily bad reasons, but they're not necessarily good ones either, and most families end up with nagging doubts about whether they chose well or just chose to stop looking.
My Care Journey changes this dynamic by giving you a framework that's as systematic as the decision deserves. You're not winging it. You're not relying on memory. You're not hoping you haven't forgotten something important. You're working through a structured process that captures everything, compares it properly, and helps you reach a decision you can defend to yourself and your family.
Beyond Just Finding a Place
The journey doesn't end when someone moves into a care home or starts receiving home care. My Care Journey continues to serve you during the transition period and beyond. You can track the settling-in process using built-in checklists. You can maintain communication logs if you need to document conversations with care providers. You can monitor how things are going and spot patterns that might need addressing.
For families managing the earlier stages of dementia, where someone is still at home but needs increasing support, the system helps you coordinate multiple home care professionals, track their visits and performance, and manage the gradual ramp-up of care intensity that typically happens over months or years.
The platform also recognizes that these decisions rarely involve just one person. Multiple siblings, adult children making decisions for parents, or couples navigating care for one partner all need ways to collaborate effectively. My Care Journey allows shared access with controlled permissions, collaborative note-taking, and structured discussion threads that keep everyone informed without requiring another family meeting that never seems to resolve anything.
What's Coming
We're building this feature based on direct feedback from families who are currently going through this process or have recently completed it. What actually helps? What's just digital clutter? What looks good in theory but creates more work in practice?
Current development is exploring enhanced comparison tools, integration with funding calculators that save your results, automated reminders for follow-up tasks you've committed to, and connections to local authority liaison tools for families navigating the council funding maze. We're also exploring expert consultation booking, direct messaging with care providers you're evaluating, and community features that let you connect with other families at similar stages without compromising privacy.
If you're currently searching for care and have specific needs or frustrations with existing tools, we want to hear about them. This isn't a finished product being imposed on you. It's infrastructure being built in response to real problems that real families tell us they're experiencing. The more input we get during development, the more useful the final system will be.
Getting Started
Even before the full My Care Journey feature is completed, you can create an account and start using the basic tools available now. This includes saving your benchmark results, building your initial shortlist of care providers, and accessing the free resources and guides we've developed. As new features become available, they'll automatically appear in your account without requiring any additional setup.
The goal is simple: give you the systematic framework and decision infrastructure that this kind of important, complex, emotionally charged decision actually requires. Not another database to search. Not another list to scroll through. A complete workspace that supports you from initial confusion through to confident decision and beyond.
This feature is under active development. If you'd like to contribute ideas, provide feedback on what would actually help you, or learn more about what is actually available today, please register. We're building this for families like yours, and your input directly shapes what gets prioritised.