Companionship Care vs Personal Care: What's the Difference?
Companionship care means someone visits regularly to spend time with an older person: conversation, company on a walk, a hand with the shopping, a lift to a GP appointment. Personal care means hands-on physical help: washing, dressing, toileting, giving medication. The two get lumped together constantly, and the distinction matters, because only one of them is regulated by the Care Quality Commission.
What companionship care actually covers
Companionship care is about presence and connection, not physical assistance. In practice that usually means:
- Regular visits for conversation and company
- Accompanying someone to GP or hospital appointments
- Help with shopping or errands
- Encouragement to get out of the house, to a café or for a walk
- Simply being there, so someone isn't facing the day alone
None of this involves touching or assisting with a person's body. That's the line.
What personal care covers, and why it's different
Personal care is hands-on: washing, dressing, help using the toilet, managing medication, mobility support that involves physical handling. Because it involves direct physical contact and medical risk, personal care in England is a regulated activity, and anyone providing it has to be registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Companionship-only support, where nobody touches or physically assists the person, falls outside what the CQC regulates. That's not a loophole. It's the actual legal boundary between the two kinds of support, and it's why companionship-only services can exist as something other than a registered care agency.
Which one does your family actually need?
A lot of families start looking for "care" when what they actually need is company. If your mum is managing her own medication and getting herself washed and dressed fine, but has stopped going out because she's lost confidence or has nobody to go with, that's a companionship need, not a personal care one. If she needs help in the bathroom or with medication, that's personal care, and it needs a CQC-registered agency, not a companionship service.
Getting this distinction right matters, because paying an agency rate for personal care when all that's actually needed is company costs more than it should, for a service that doesn't fit.
How AirCarers Companion works
AirCarers Companion is a companionship-only platform. We don't provide personal care, and we're not CQC-registered, because companionship doesn't require it. Every companion is self-employed and DBS-checked, and sets their own rate directly with the family. AirCarers charges a flat platform fee per hour on top of that rate, rather than taking a percentage cut the way an agency does, so more of what a family pays reaches the person actually doing the visiting.
We currently cover Ware, Hertford, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Bishop's Stortford and Sawbridgeworth.
Most of the families who come to us aren't looking for a carer. They're looking for someone to notice their mum's gone quiet, or their dad's stopped leaving the house, before it turns into something more serious. That's the gap we exist to fill: help before care.
If you need personal care instead
If what your relative needs involves washing, dressing, medication or mobility support, you need a CQC-registered home care agency, not a companionship service, and we'd rather point you in the right direction than pretend we can help with something we don't do.
If you're not sure which one applies, get in touch and we'll talk it through honestly: lucie@aircarers.co.uk or 07455 750006.