Care Show London review
system. We need to understand what that means for care providers and people living with dementia, and we need to understand what that means in terms of whether we’re going to prioritise diagnosis, or whether we’re going to work on new treatments. What do we want to spend that money on? “We always say, because of the stats you heard earlier, that we need to be focusing on diagnosis. But physicians say to me: ‘great, let’s focus on diagnosis. Let’s get that percentage rate up. But what’s the point if there isn’t anything afterwards, and there isn’t the right support?’” This was an informative chat, with
Anna and Tim doing a good job of setting out the myriad difficulties that face the ever-growing number of people living with dementia in the UK, and the government’s ongoing failure to grasp the nettle. I would have liked to have heard more from Anna about her father and her personal experience, but perhaps the Channel 4 documentary already had things covered in this regard. Nonetheless, it was great to see a ‘big name’ in conversation at the show.
Reputation matters The Care Keynote Theatre also hosted the timely session The future of digital reputation in care: preparing for the AI era by senior solutions engineer David Holbrook and account executive Declan Gregson from real-time reputation management platform Reputation. The session explored how providers can use AI to enhance their online reputation and customer experience, with David and Declan raising an important distinction between the ‘traditional’ Google searches of yesteryear and the more conversational and subjective AI-based searches that – through apps such as ChatGPT – people looking for care are increasingly turning to. “We’re almost having a conversation
with AI,” said David, explaining that care homes need to be mindful of this change in emphasis in order to make sure they remain discoverable via internet search. This means moving beyond “old-style” Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and towards what David called “sentiment analysis”, which he said was “a huge part” of AI search: “By sentiment analysis, what we mean is: if I’m putting my grandmother into care, and I’ve [entered into ChatGPT] ‘I want somewhere with great dementia care, amazing outdoor gardens, and where they play games that are dementia friendly’, what AI is doing is it’s looking at all of [a care
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home’s] reviews online, and asking: ‘who’s talking about these categories in a positive way?’.”
He continued: “Often when you search on Google and then search on one of these AI search channels, you will see completely different results. AI models look for patterns and topic-specific language. If your care home is really strong in one category and people aren’t talking about that category, you are not going to rank in those areas.” Put simply: “If people aren’t talking
about it, AI doesn’t know about it.” With the rules of the game changing fast, there is an increasing onus on care homes to think about the key strengths of their brand and how well these strengths are reflected in what people are saying about them online. With AI search likely to become the preferred means of finding information, continuous and proactive monitoring by AI tools such as those offered by Reputation may become essential for care providers looking to maintain a strong position in internet rankings. While this leads us to the slightly baffling proposition of AI being used to monitor and interpret the results of internet searches carried out by other AI,
this was certainly a fascinating talk. Sticking with the AI theme, another highlight was the Care Keynote What if a light could change the way care is delivered – forever? with NOBI CTO Stijn Verrept and Leanne Scrogham, registered manager at the Abbeyfield Group’s Hartland House – the latter speaking passionately about the many benefits the manufacturer’s devices have brought to the day-to-day operation of her home; not least in bringing about an 84 per cent reduction in falls. I found it particularly interesting to watch footage of a suspected ‘fall’ in a care home taken directly from a NOBI lamp, with the resident anonymised via technology that visualised them on- screen as a multi-coloured wireframe.
Cracks and madness and idiosyncrasies Thursday afternoon saw, for me, the highlight of Care Show London, in the form of Care Keynote session My dad & dementia: a fireside chat with David Baddiel, in which the author, comedian, and Alzheimer’s Ambassador chatted with Alzheimer’s Society CEO Kate Lee about his father, Colin, who died in 2022 having suffered from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) – otherwise known as Pick’s disease; a topic which David discussed in the 2017 documentary The Trouble with Dad and his 2024 memoir My Family. Kate started by asking David why he had chosen to use his personal experiences to talk publicly about dementia and thus help to reduce the stigma surrounding the condition.
“I think the answer to that,” said David, “is that when my mum died, I went to her funeral, and there were a lot of people there telling me how wonderful my mum was. And after a while, I thought: ‘the thing that binds all these people together is they didn’t really know her’. That’s the sense I got, and that’s what happens when someone dies – we start to idealise them out of existence. It’s a terrible thing to do because people are much more complicated than that. People are full of cracks and madness and idiosyncrasies. And I thought the same thing was happening when my dad got dementia. In wanting to talk about it, what we tend to do – in the same way that we do when someone dies – is we sort of assume that they’re ‘gone’, and therefore we can only talk about them in silence, in reverence; we can’t be funny about them anymore. We have to pretend that nothing they do is silly or absurd. It’s a disservice to people.
“When my dad was diagnosed with Pick’s
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com June 2025
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