About Us

WHO WE ARE

Instilling compassion into home care

Penrose Care was established in 2012 in response to what we perceived as a need to fundamentally reform the home care sector in the UK to help improve elderly care and disabilities care in the UK. The vision of Penrose Care is simple – we aspire to deliver excellent and professional home care services to our clients combined with compassion so that all those that we care for feel just that – cared for.

Committed to being a centre of excellence in home care

Inspired by what they had seen in health care centres of excellence over the years in the course of their professional work and by their own personal experiences within their families, Penrose Care was founded by Robert Stephenson-Padron, a health care analyst, and Dr Matthew Knight, a local hospital physician.

Based in the heart of Belsize Village, Hampstead

We believe in serving the local community. Our first branch is based in the heart of Belsize Village, NW3, in north west London, the community in which the founders and directors have lived for (in the case of some) decades.

Personalised care with compassion and dignity

The Penrose Care model means that we have our contract directly with those we care for (be that privately paid or via direct payments), and are not reliant on block contracts from the local authority. This gives us the independence to be able to truly design a package of care around the needs of our clients.

Please explore our website, email us, or give us a call to arrange a chat, a home visit or to pop into our office in the heart of Belsize village. We believe that we offer a unique personalised care service that can help you or your loved ones live a more joyful and secure life at home.

Accreditations

SUPPORT WORKERS

Our Home Care Support Workers are:

  • Carefully selected and extensively trained. All our workers hold a satisfactory DBS (formerly CRB) enhanced check and hold a full first aid certificate from the British Red Cross opposed to just the “awareness” training common in the care sector.
  • Paid a Living Wage as highlighted in the BBC News, the Guardian, and Sky News to help foster exceptional quality and high levels of morale. We are proud to be one of only four Accredited Living Wage Employers in the London home care sector out of over 1,000 agencies.
  • Equipped with an advanced IT system which includes an NFC-enabled time management system. This compares to the slow and problematic telephone-based time management system common in the sector.
  • Provide specialist services including dementia care, waking night-care and sleep-in support, post-orthopaedic surgery re-enablement, monitoring for those with epilepsy, learning disabilities care, care for those with physical disabilities, travel care, and keeping Kosher assistance to members of the Jewish Community.
  • Supported by a professional management team committed to operating ethically as featured in homecare.co.uk and praised by a client’s family member on BBC Radio 4 You and Yours (go to 32:30 into the recording). As a testament to our courage to make a difference, we are one of only seven social care providers (out of over 26,000 providers in England) to back Citizens UK‘s historic Social Care Charter at its 15 Oct 2013 launch.

 

We provide short-visits, day-visits, sleep-overs, night care and live-in care (however, we pay our workers’ for their time sleeping and so therefore charge for this time) including to persons with dementia, physical disabilities and/or learning disabilities. We provide both long-term engagements and fixed-term engagements such as for travel care, respite care, and re-enablement. With an especial focus on customer service, Penrose Care is contactable by phone or e-mail 24/7, year-round.

OUR VALUES
Compassion should be at the heart of care. As we want the best care for our families, we believe you deserve the best care for your family. In order to provide the best care, we strongly believe we need the best people.

We are committed to providing the best care provided by the best staff

Penrose Care is proud to be one of the first home care agencies in London to be an Accredited Living Wage Employer. We see this as a demonstration of our genuine commitment to do things better and differently. Our Living Wage commitment stems from our belief that core to successfully delivering excellent home care with compassion is having the best staff, selected for their human touch as well as their professional qualities.

To attract such talent, we have to provide a decent wage as well as an enjoyable workplace that equips them with the best training and infrastructure. Care is a person-to-person service, and so by attracting and retaining the best people in the sector, we believe we can provide the best home care in England.

We are committed to providing excellent care with compassion

The vision of Penrose Care is simple – we aspire to deliver an excellent and professional home care service to our clients combined with compassion, so that all those that we care for feel just that – cared for. This vision drives our organisation’s culture and operating practices. These practices include the adoption of the ‘always’ events recommended in June 2012 by the Commission on Dignity in Care for Older People:

Always treat those in your care as they wish to be treated – with respect, dignity and courtesy.

Always remember nutrition and hydration needs.

Always encourage formal and informal feedback from older people and their relatives, carers and advocates, to improve practice.

Always challenge poor practice at the time – and learn as a team from the error.

Always report poor practice where appropriate – the people in your care have rights and you have professional responsibilities.

We are devoted to safeguarding those we care for and those we employ

We are devoted to operating Penrose Care ethically and in ways that safeguard those we care for and our employees. This is vital, as we want those who entrust their care to us to know we will still be here, five or ten years from now, providing the best care in England; those who entrust their and their family’s livelihood to us to know they will still have a secure job twenty or so years from now; and those who volunteer with us, to know that when they are in old age or infirm many decades from now, we will be able to return the kindness they showed to us and their community.

This is why our care recipients can be assured that we will not accept such agreements as block contracts where the loss of such an agreement puts our organisation and their care at risk. We will avoid long-term debt unlike many of England’s larger home care companies. When times are tough, our owners will “take the pain” to the extent possible so our staff’s families can feel secure.