Our Approach
A Good Life is a domiciliary care provider inspired by the Buurtzorg model, which revolutionised community care in the Netherlands. We deliver person-centred care and support to people aged 65+ living in Chiswick, Acton, Brentford, Ealing, Kew, Gunnersbury, Richmond and Sheen.
Our purpose is to support people in their own home to live a good life, whatever that means for them.
Our home care is bespoke to the people we support and includes daily life activities, such as housework, shopping and appointments, admin tasks such as general correspondence, application forms and assistance with technology and of course, lots of fun leisure and social activities too.
At A Good Life we operate through small, self-organised neighbourhood teams supported by a registered manager and professional coaches.
Working within clearly defined neighbourhoods, we’re able to build strong, localised relationships with the people we support and ensure high-quality, responsive care.
Our overarching aim is to enable older people to live safe, meaningful, and independent lives in their communities, supported by consistent and compassionate personal care assistants they know and trust.
Our care is the opposite of a visit where the aim is to complete a tick list - our aim is to build strong relationships with our clients and to focus on promoting independence and a ‘good life”. By getting to know our clients we can discover what a good life means for them and create goals which we work towards together. We focus on what’s ‘strong’ rather than what’s ‘wrong’. We ask what “matters” rather than what is the matter. We allow clients the time to complete any tasks which they are able to do.
At a Good Life Limited we truly believe we are at our best when we are serving others. Our local neighbourhood teams are committed to serving people and our registered manager and coach are committed to serving our teams. With this way of working, we aim for “a good life’ for all!
A Good Life for our Clients
Each client has a primary personal care assistant - we like to call them ‘Angels’, as that’s what Pip, our founder, was called by her mum.
Our work has relationships at its heart, building relationships with clients and the people involved in their care. This ensures our clients feel secure and well cared for in their own homes, it builds trust which allows people to try new things and talk about issues that concern them, and it creates a feeling of teamwork.
It enables us to work in an extremely person-centred way – delivering care to people the way they want it.
A Good Life for our Teams
We recognise that for our clients the most important people in our organisation are our local neighbourhood teams.
We create a service where staff feel trusted and empowered. Teams are self-organised, but they’re never left alone. They have tools to make decisions, and they have a coach, a registered manager and each other to turn to when needed.
Our staff are selected through a valued based interview process, and we actively recruit people that create a diverse team with complimentary skills, knowledge and experience. This not only helps staff to support each other but also to provide a better service to the people they support.
We foster a learning culture where ideas for innovation are encouraged and acted upon. We invest both time and resources into a continuous programme of training and improvement for our entire workforce.
A Good Life for our Neighbourhood
Our teams of personal care assistants are deliberately small (typically 3–12 professionals), self-organising, and embedded in the community they serve.
Our work puts the client at the heart of their care in their neighbourhood. Our teams actively introduce themselves to stakeholders involved in our clients care such as GPs, Allied Health Professionals and Community Nursing teams to facilitate good communication and build positive circles of support.
By working in this collaborative and communicative way, we aim to reduce the stress for the professionals and for family, friends and significant others and hopefully increase the support available and felt by other unpaid carers so that a good life extends to everybody.
A Good Life for the Environment
A Good Life Limited encourages care workers to walk or cycle where possible, reducing our environmental footprint. By working locally, we reduce travel time and increase face-to-face time with clients, enabling more personalised and sustainable care.
A Good Life for the Future
We are committed to redefining care for those over 65 and creating a model that can work for all.
A Good Life Limited has a clear vision for the organisation and through our day-to-day actions we will consistently display our passion and commitment to transforming home care through a scalable, neighbourhood-based model that is relational, empowering, and community-focused.