An app for the personal assistants you employ

1. What a personal assistant does

Personal assistants, or PAs, support someone with the things their care plan sets out: personal care, medication, meals, getting to college or work, company. Some work for one family full time, some for two or three families a few hours each. Skills for Care estimates well over a hundred thousand people in England work as PAs, employed by the person they support or their family. Almost none of them have been given professional tools.

2. What the app gives them

• Today's calls in order, with the time, the person, and what the call is for.
• The person's page: needs, risks, how they like things done, allergies, the key safe, who to call.
• Check-in and check-out at the door, stamped with the time and location.
• Medication due on this call, with given, prompted, not required, refused, not given or other recorded at the dose, and a reason where one is needed.
• Notes written at the call, with the activities ticked, read by the family that evening.
• The care diary: every note every carer wrote about this person, week by week, read before the first call.
• A hand-off to the next carer, pinned to a chosen call so it pops up for whoever attends.
• Holiday requests sent to you to approve, with the gap shown.
• Works without signal. Everything is kept on the phone with its original time and sent when the connection returns.

It is the same Carelo app used by carers at CQC-registered providers. Nothing is cut down for a household; the parts that only an agency needs simply never appear.

3. A day with the app

07:25. Amy opens the app and sees her first call, Daniel at 07:30. She reads last night's note from Tom: he was tired after college and went to bed early. She arrives, taps check in at the door. The call shows the morning medication due; she records it as given with the time and the amount. Before she leaves she writes three lines: showered with prompting, ate well, chose the blue jumper himself, keen to go to college. She taps check out at 09:30.

Daniel's mother reads the note on her phone on the train. His sister in Leeds reads it at lunch. Tom reads it in the car before his 16:00 call. Nobody made a phone call to find out how the morning went.

4. When one carer hands over to the next

Two things make a personal assistant arrangement fragile: a carer going on holiday, and a carer leaving. With the app, cover is a rota change the new carer sees on their phone, with the full diary and the routine already there. A carer who leaves takes nothing with them; the next one reads the diary before the first call. The record stays with the household, which is where it belongs.

5. What a carer sees, and does not

A carer sees the loved ones they are rostered to and nothing else. They cannot see your family logins, your messages with other carers, or the household's settings. Each carer login works on one phone at a time, unlocks with a PIN, and is set up with a one-time code you issue. Pause or remove a login the moment someone stops working for you.