Searching for care in a post-pandemic landscape

If you took a snapshot of the care sector before and after the pandemic, you would see two fundamentally different images. Things have changed dramatically and because of that it seems easy to conclude that the pandemic has directly changed care and how people search for it. However, the real cause of change is not so simple, and understanding this is important to understanding the future of care. If these changes were simply the result of the pandemic, there might be some expectation for them to revert, but this would be a poor prediction.

Go back ten years and the average person looking for care for a loved one might simply find the home down the road, likely suggested by someone they know, and that was where the search ended. However, over recent years, that approach has fallen out of favour. Online marketplaces gave us the ability to shop around and when people tried doing that in a care search, it was nearly impossible.

The level of information was simply not there – there was a disconnect between what people had come to expect in other sectors and what was being offered in social care. Demand started to rise and thanks to the determination and hard work of many individuals and some forward-thinking care providers, care slowly became more transparent.