Helping families read the facts, not guess at them

Choosing a care home for someone you love is one of the harder decisions a family makes, usually under time pressure, and usually while trying to make sense of official documents that weren't written for a general reader. iCare exists to close that gap: we take the Care Quality Commission's registration and inspection data for care homes in England and present it in a form a family can actually use in the time they have.

What we are

iCare is a directory. For each registered care home we show its current CQC rating, the ratings for each of the five categories the CQC inspects against, when it was last inspected, and — for homes we've reviewed — a plain-language summary of what the inspection actually found. Where we have geographic data, we also show nearby homes of a similar type, so a search doesn't dead-end at one result.

What we are not

• We are not a medical or care advisory service. Nothing on this site is a recommendation that a specific home is right for a specific person.
• We are not paid to rank, sort or promote any care home. A home's position in a list is never for sale.
• We are not a financial adviser. Where we discuss paying for care, we explain how the system works in general terms — we don't sell or arrange financial products on a care home's own page.
• We do not publish stock or AI-generated photography in place of a real one. If you haven't seen a photo of a home on iCare, it's because the provider hasn't added one yet.

How this fits together

Two pages explain the mechanics behind what you're reading: how we source our data covers where the numbers come from and how often they're refreshed, and our editorial policy covers how the written summaries are produced and checked. If something on a home's page looks wrong or out of date, every record has a way to tell us directly.