Frequently Asked Questions

TrustonTap is a care agency that helps support you with experienced carers tailored to your individual needs. We give families choice and control over who cares for their loved ones, allowing vulnerable people to stay in their own homes for longer whilst ensuring their carers are better rewarded for the care they provide. We provide trusted and affordable care and support by matching you or your loved ones with a handpicked carer near you, removing the complexity and reducing the cost of arranging home care.

You can either register with us online or you can pick up the phone so we can talk through your care requirements. Once we are happy we have all the information we need about yourself or your loved one,  we can start your search. We will then match you with a choice of vetted and experienced carers in your local area, based on your needs, location, and preferences. We will then send you a selection of the most suitable carers. You can review those carers and choose an individual that suits your needs and your budget.

We won’t leave you on your own, we here every step of the way to help you make the best decision. We can help identify the most suitable carer(s) to meet your needs and put you in touch with one another to arrange an introductory meeting.

We recognise that your care needs may change and that you need the flexibility of being able to alter your arrangements. This needs to be balanced with the need of your carer(s) to be able to manage their workloads and to ensure that they are able to support you when required.

For small changes in hours and days, our carers will try to accommodate your needs. However, for cancellations with less than 48 hours notice you will be charged the appropriate care costs. Our standard notice period is two weeks and is detailed in your terms of Booking. Should you wish to cancel within the first 6 weeks an early cancellation fee will be charged.

For anyone that wishes to book for a shorter period than 6 weeks, we can arrange a Short-term booking, in which we will ask you to commit to the amount of care you want. Full details of Short-Term bookings can be provided by our customer services team.

TrustonTap uses the latest technology to remove many of the traditional agency costs, saving you money and ensuring that all our carers are better rewarded. Our carers tend to be more experienced and often more motivated than other traditional agencies.

Prices start at £17/hour – £25/hour depending on your care needs and carer experience. Our average cost of care is £20/hour compared to £30/hour through many traditional domiciliary care agencies.

All of our carers are self-employed and set their own charge-out rates. They decide their own schedules and we leave it to them to control the delivery of their care to you in the way that they believe is best. We believe that this gives you a more dedicated, personal service with the consistency of one trusted carer who is able to meet your needs on a reliable and regular basis.

Traditional care agencies often send in different carers each day. With TrustonTap you have complete control and the opportunity to have the same trusted carer coming in on a daily basis.

All our carers receive regular feedback from customers and we ensure all feedback is published on our website. This ensures that we maintain the highest quality of care.

We have designed TrustonTap to be simple and convenient for you or your family to use. It’s easy for you to choose the right carer with the right skills at the right price to come and give you some help. Plus, all payments are transparent through our secure cashless payment system.

At TrustonTap, we believe in enlisting highly capable carers to support you and ensuring that they are fairly rewarded. All selected carers are self-employed and set their own rates of pay according to their experience and skills, taking into account that they need to cover their own travel costs and expenses.

Throughout the course of any contracts with you, your cost of care is determined by the hourly rate that the carer charges. This is transparent on the Carer’s profile and will be detailed in your booking confirmation. For the services we provide to the carers, we charge and subsequently deduct a commission from the carers to cover necessary costs as agreed with them when they sign up with us.

However we have removed many of the traditional agency costs to ensure that our carers earn significantly more than carers working in traditional agencies. We would normally expect our carers to be earning 40% more per hour than if they were employed by a traditional care agency. This makes it attractive for carers to work with us, and ensures that we can be selective in the carers we choose to work with TrustonTap.

We have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to pay for the support you receive, and have developed a secure online payment process that ensures we are protecting both you and the carers that are supporting you.

In most instances, we agree how many hours per week you require care for and we set up a booking between you and your carer(s) that reflects this.

Each week, your carer completes a timesheet in relation to the booking, and we send you an invoice, depending on how many hours care had been provided to you in the previous weekly period. We then deduct payment by Direct Debit before transferring to the account of the carer. This ensures that you are only charged for the number of hours you have actually received each week, and you are not charged more than the maximum hours you have specified.

Yes. We recognise the value of meeting your TrustonTap carer in advance of an engagement starting. Where this cannot be easily arranged in person, we encourage you to arrange a video call (e.g. via Skype, WhatsApp or Facetime) with your recommended carer.

This introductory visit is free of charge, in exceptional circumstances there maybe a small fee. It is an opportunity for you to confirm details of what is expected of the carer on the care visits, and for the carers to check that they have the competency and confidence to deliver what is required of them. Subject to any special contractual conditions to the contrary, your booking can be cancelled without penalty if either you or the carer are unhappy at this stage.

Feel free to ring us and we can assist you should you have any difficulty.

You can book as little as four hours per week or as much as you like. For convenience, we encourage you to make the booking for the maximum number of hours you are likely to need and then separately arrange the precise times with your TrustonTap carer. We will ensure you are only charged for the number of hours you have actually received each week, and you are not charged more than the maximum hours you have specified.

Should you agree to proceed with a booking for a particular carer, you agree to the Carer/ Client Agreement which comes into effect between you and the TrustonTap carer.

This Agreement governs the nature of your contractual arrangement with the TrustonTap carer and is a standard agreement that applies for all your engagements via TrustonTap. (As TrustonTap carers are self-employed contractors, it is not compulsory for them to use this agreement. They will let you know if they wish to use a different agreement in advance of any booking).

In addition to the Carer/ Client agreement, your assignments are governed by the TrustonTap Client Terms and your carer are governed by the TrustonTap Assistant Terms they agreed when they were selected as a carer.

Once payment details have been taken, we send both you and the carer a summary of what you have booked.

We have arranged public liability insurance with £5m coverage underwritten by a leading insurance underwriter. In addition, many of our TrustonTap carers have their own personal liability insurance. For TrustonTap carers who offer Transportation in their own cars, we insist that they are fully insured to protect you if anything happens. Safety and security of you and of our carers is of paramount importance to us.

No. Since all the carers with TrustonTap are self-employed, you are not liable to pay Employers’ National Insurance.

It is not possible for you to pay our carers directly, but payment via the TrustonTap site has been designed to be very simple and straightforward. All payments are made via our secure online payment system in a process designed to protect both you and the carers.

Any direct cash payments that are made or requested would breach the terms and conditions we have with each of the carers would endanger their ability to secure further work and would invalidate the insurance cover.

As detailed in the Client Terms that govern TrustonTap’s relationship with you, a Placement fee would be charged to you if you were to agree on any direct engagement with a carer that we have introduced you to. Please ring us if you wish to discuss this further.

We know the importance of continuity of care and our carer will try to provide you with as much continuity as possible. However, there are times when they may be ill or away, and you may need someone to cover during their absence.

This can usually be arranged via the TrustonTap customer services team who will recommend the most suitable carers in your area. However, we will not proactively put susbstiute carers in place without your express request.

Recruiting the very best carers is a key priority for us and we put considerable effort into our selection process. We select our brilliant team of trusted local carers with the confidence that they can come to your home and deliver an exceptional service to you. In fact, one of our key criteria is that we would be happy to recommend them to our own relatives.

We carefully screen and interview all our trusted carers via a multi-stage recruitment process to ensure that all our carers on the TrustonTap site are competent, compassionate, kind, honest and reliable. Everyone is fully vetted and DBS background checked. Plus, we obtain references on all carers that we take on, to ensure the professionalism and trustworthiness of the people who will be supporting you. Over the last 6 years, we have taken on less than 5% of carers that have applied to us.

To support the quality of care that is provided to you, we encourage our carers to maintain their professional development and provide a number of written and video training materials via their bespoke carer portals. We insist that all our carers complete face to face annual refresher training in Safeguarding, Manual Handling and First Aid.

Yes, you can have several TrustonTap carers providing the support you need. It may be that you would like to have one carer to assist you with general home help on certain mornings, but would like a different carer to come round on different days to take you out to the shops.

Our carers have different backgrounds, different skills and different availabilities. At TrustonTap we are able to accommodate your preferences to allow you to have parallel contracts with a number of them.

Each of our carers sets their own rate of pay according to their skills and experience. Most of them have higher rates for weekends and bank holidays. All rates of pay are shown clearly on your booking confirmation.

We are always happy to help and keen to assist you in choosing the most suitable carer, whether it is for a short term assignment or a longer term arrangement. In the end, it is up to you to make the final decision. Whatever your choice, TrustonTap customer services will always be there to support you.

If you are not happy with your arrangement, in the first instance we would encourage you to tell your carer what you are unhappy about. It maybe that its something they are doing or not doing, that can easily be sorted out.  Your feedback will ensure that their care to you can be modified so that you are satisfied going forward.

Sometimes it may be better to talk to us. Please let us know immediately if we can help and if you have concerns over any of the carers. If you believe your carer has breached their contract with you, we will review the evidence and reimburse you if appropriate. At the same time, we will review any evidence presented to us by a carer who has reason to believe that you have breached your contract with them.

All our carers have been shown the TrustonTap Code of Conduct which is designed to set the standards of care that we expect of them. This code is modelled on the Code of Conduct for Healthcare and Adult Social Care workers in England. The code is designed to give you the confidence that you will be treated with dignity, respect and compassion at all times.

We recognise on the odd occasion that the relationship with the carer may not work out, and in these cirsumstances we will try to do everything to help find an alternative carer. Equally your plans may change and you may wish to adjust your level of care from TrustonTap.

We know how important it is to have people you can really trust. That’s why we strive to always go the extra mile in ensuring you can be confident in the carers that you take on.

We put considerable efforts into hand-picking the very best carers to be available to you. We only list those individuals who we would be happy to recommend to our own relatives, and have established a very thorough vetting procedure to ensure that all of them can be trusted.

In addition to the usual application forms and processes, we also conduct thorough individual interviews and ensure that all carers are fully vetted and DBS checked. We check identity documents, rights to work in the UK and training certificates. Additionally, we take two references on each carer.

We only engage with carers who we believe to be competent, compassionate, kind, honest and reliable, and insist that all carers register as self employed with HMRC. We ask them all to take out individual carer insurance.

Although TrustonTap carers conduct personal care for many clients, TrustonTap is defined as an introductory agency by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and is not required to register.

As a result of this, we are unable to make changes to a care plan, to recommend the increased frequency of visits or to take responsibility for replacing a care worker for personal care assignments. We are also unable to direct changes to the activity of the carer in relation to Personal Care & Hygiene work. All TrustonTap carers are self-employed and are therefore not required to be registered with CQC.

Although regulatory agencies are currently unregulated by CQC, TrustonTap uphold carer quality standards by agreement with regional authorities and will only list carers on our platform who meet the TrustonTap Qualified Professional Carer (QPC) standard.

Establishing this benchmark ensures that carers offered to clients in the region conform to the following standards:

• Understanding of the TrustonTap Code of Conduct
• Agreement to TrustonTap Carer Assistant Terms and Conditions 
• Identity checks and confirmation of their right to work in the UK
• Enhanced DBS
• Training certificates checked and recorded
• Annual refresher training in Moving & Handling, First Aid and Safeguarding
• Confirmation of HRMC tax reference number
• Support by 2 references

Furthermore, TrustonTap carers are supported by a bespoke personal training portal through which they have access to over 30 training manuals and videos to support their professional development.

No. We require in our terms and conditions that all carers are self-employed. As self-employed individuals, each carer determines his or her hourly rates, terms of engagement, bookings, schedules, responsibility for the delivery of tasks, transportation, training, holidays and tax affairs