Why we built WellChosen in Bury

The Bury Times covered WellChosen this month. It felt like a good moment to explain, properly and in our own words, what we’ve built and why it started here.

The phone call nobody is ready for

Most families come to home care suddenly. Someone comes out of hospital, or a fall changes what’s possible, and there’s a weekend to sort it out. What happens next is almost always the same: a list of agency numbers, and an afternoon of repeating the same painful story down the phone.

Eight calls in, you’ve learned that three have no capacity, two don’t cover your postcode, one doesn’t do half-hour visits, and nobody will give you a straight answer on price. You still haven’t arranged any care. And you’re doing this while working, or caring, or both.

It shouldn’t take that. One conversation ought to be enough.

Tell us about Mum once

That’s the whole idea. You tell us once what’s needed — the area, the hours, the kind of help, and what you can afford — and we do the ringing round.

There are two ways to use it, and neither one is better than the other.

If you’re comfortable online, you can put your postcode in and see the CQC-registered agencies near you, side by side. If you’d rather not, ring us or send an email and we’ll do it for you. We’ll talk it through, find out who genuinely has space, and come back to you with the options. For a lot of the people we speak to — often in their seventies or eighties, often exhausted — that’s the route that actually works.

Either way, nothing reaches an agency until you say so. We invite three to five providers who genuinely fit. They reply in writing with how they’d provide the care and what it would cost. You read those replies, ask questions if you want to, and when you’ve decided, you press a button to share your details. Until that moment, nobody has your number.

As we put it to the Bury Times: all of the control is in the family’s hands.

It’s free, and it stays free

Free for families. Always. No fees, no sign-up, and we don’t sell anyone’s details.

We don’t take a commission and we don’t charge a referral fee, so we earn nothing from which agency you choose or how large the care package is. Agencies pay a flat monthly membership if they want to be matched — that’s it. A listing itself costs them nothing.

We think that matters. If a comparison site earns more when you pick a particular provider, it isn’t really a comparison site.

The other half of the problem

There’s a second reason we built this, and it gets less attention than it deserves.

Bury has good, small, independent home care agencies run by people from here. Several of them are struggling — not because the care is poor, but because they can’t outspend national franchises to be found. A family searching online sees the providers with the biggest advertising budgets, not the ones with space this week.

Giving those agencies visibility costs them nothing and keeps good care in the borough. Providers with a steadier flow of clients take on more local carers, and care work is one of the few sectors where growth turns almost directly into local jobs.

We’ve spent the last few weeks sitting in offices across Bury talking to these businesses face to face. That’s not a scalable way to build a company, but it’s the only way to understand what they actually need.

Why Bury

Because we’re from here.

Umer has lived in Bury since 2005 and did his schooling and college here. Kamran is from Unsworth. We’ve spent years in software and the last few in the care sector, which is long enough to see how wide the gap is between how families experience this and how it looks on paper.

Starting somewhere you know means you can check whether it’s working by walking into an office and asking. It also means the people it’s for are the people you’ll run into at the shops, which is a useful discipline.

We’d like this to become something families across the country use. But it made sense to get it right in one borough first.

If you’re looking for care right now

You don’t have to fill anything in. Call us and we’ll start the search for you.

Find home care near you →

Prefer to talk? 0161 884 8629