Care Centre is a people management platform developed specifically for care homes and care home groups, supplied as one product at one price per registered bed. Access HSC is the health and social care division of The Access Group, serving home care, residential and nursing homes, supported living and the NHS through separately priced modules — Point of Care, Care and Clinical, Medication Management, Care Rostering, Care Compliance, Learning, Policies and Procedures, Messenger, Care Connect and Evo — behind one sign-on.
The main difference is one of scope and purchasing model: modules priced and implemented separately around the resident record, or one platform covering the people and operational requirements of the home.
One platform and a modular suite
Care Centre holds rota planning, time and attendance, leave, payroll preparation, HR onboarding and compliance, policies, communication and recognition, surveys and maintenance on a single staff record and staff app, across a web dashboard, native mobile applications and an Android tablet terminal.
Access HSC supplies those areas as separate products: Point of Care for care planning and medication; Care Rostering, the successor to Access People Planner, for scheduling, invoicing and payroll, with People Planner Residential for care homes; and Care Compliance, Messenger, Learning, Policies and Procedures, screening and recruitment alongside, with reward and recognition through another division of the group.
Access HSC therefore offers the broader catalogue; Care Centre is structured around the workforce and the running of the home within one product, and is in use in homes including Esmere Gardens, Banbury Heights and Shipston Lodge.
Rota planning designed around care roles
Care Centre plans rotas around care roles such as nurses, senior carers and carers, so the skill mix of each shift is visible as it is built. Contracted hours are tracked per employee, Working Time rules can include opt-outs, and bank and agency workers sit within the same rota.
Access Care Rostering provides drag-and-drop scheduling, carer-to-client matching on skills and continuity, and route planning, with People Planner Residential adding minimum staffing levels and alerts to “staffing gaps or skills deficiencies”.
The distinction is one of origin: Access plans outwards from the client and the visit; Care Centre plans around the care roles each shift requires.
One company, multiple homes
Care Centre has been structured for groups: settings are established at company level and configured per home, from staffing budgets and leave limits to pay rates, clock-in settings and onboarding requirements, and employees working across homes use one staff record and login.
Access Care Compliance collates action plans “in one place for every location”, and Evo provides one sign-on across the products bought; company-level rota, clock-in and leave rules with per-home overrides are not described.
Rota planning & budgets
Care Centre builds staffing budgets into the rota as hours per role, per day, per home. With Restrict By Budget enabled, a shift that would take a role beyond its allocated hours is prevented rather than flagged; a dropped shift returns its hours, and the open shift can be claimed from the phone with approval.
Access monitors staffing through minimum staffing levels and costs; an hours budget allocated to individual care roles each day, and a control preventing a shift that exceeds it, are not described.
For homes monitoring overall staffing levels and costs, Access provides that view; Care Centre is structured around care-role hours and budgets.
Time & attendance, timesheets & payroll
Care Centre allows staff to clock in with a PIN on a shared tablet, or on their own phone within a defined location, with a photograph where required. Whether an employee may clock in without a rostered shift is a setting — allowed, blocked, or held for approval — managers are alerted to a missing clock-in or clock-out, and additional time is approved before becoming overtime.
Access describes “integrated ‘clocking in’ terminals”, while its rostering FAQ states that the product “receives and stores time & attendance information from multiple sources” and names its care planning mobile application as “the best place to record time and attendance for visits”.
The distinction is one of approach: Care Centre holds attendance within the rota workflow; Access receives it from a terminal or a separate application and reconciles it afterwards.
Leave management
Care Centre shows employees their remaining entitlement in days or hours on their phone, and once approved, leave updates the rota, timesheet and payroll information. Homes can limit how many people within a role are away at once, set across a group and adjusted per home.
Access provides holiday balances, leave requests and approvals in its staff app, automatic calculation of holiday and reporting of sickness trends; a limit per role, per home, is not described.
HR & compliance
Care Centre includes HR onboarding and compliance management within the platform. Standard onboarding covers DBS checks, right-to-work documentation, references and training certificates; organisations configure their own steps, fields and expiry rules, and new employees complete it from their phone. A compliance matrix shows the whole team against every step, per home, and expiring documents generate advance reminders.
Access provides full HR records within People Planner Residential: a training matrix with expiry alerts, appraisals, supervisions, DBS alerts and applicant management. Access Care Compliance, a separate product with its own price line, adds mock inspections “based on the CQC’s new inspection framework”, an audit library and action plans for every location, across the Care Inspectorate, CIW and RQIA as well as CQC.
Care Centre does not currently provide an equivalent mock-inspection tool or audit library; its compliance functionality is centred on the employee record.
Staff communication & recognition
Care Centre includes internal communication and recognition within the same staff app: colleagues recognised against organisational values, news, events, polls and priority messages requiring acknowledgement, and chat as a workplace alternative to personal messaging services.
Posts can include photographs, uploaded video and YouTube or Vimeo links, so a home can share an event, a celebration or news from the home with the whole team. Recognition can be given as a thank-you, a star, congratulations, a work-anniversary message or employee of the month, and chat messages can include photographs.
Access Messenger provides text and voice messaging, groups and document sharing as a separate product; reward and recognition is supplied through the group’s HR division, and a company feed and priority acknowledgements are not described within the care range.
Staff, resident & family surveys
Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside resident and family surveys. Results can be analysed using AI to identify themes, and findings developed into action plans in a You said · We said · We did format, with short pulse questions between larger surveys.
Access Care Compliance includes built-in surveys; anonymity, resident and family surveys and a pulse question are not described.
Maintenance & compliance
Care Centre extends beyond people management into the operation of the building: maintenance requests with photographs, scheduled checks by room or asset, an asset register and certificates with expiry dates.
A property maintenance (CAFM) product sits elsewhere within The Access Group, and no maintenance module is described on the Access care home pages.
Care records
This is the area in which Access HSC is the more established of the two: Point of Care unifies residential care planning and medication administration within one product, with barcode scanning and pharmacy connections.
Care Centre has no care-record integrations at present, its care planning is a separate plan and medication administration is not part of its proposition; an existing care-record system would continue to run alongside.
AI
Access Evo is an AI workspace across the suite: background assistants, no-code workflow automation, a Researcher that turns CQC reports and incident logs into summaries and action plans, and a rota exception assistant that proposes cover when someone reports sick.
Care Centre uses AI more narrowly, within administrative and communication tasks rather than operational decisions: writing recognition messages, creating surveys, analysing responses and importing staff information. According to Care Centre, personal information is redacted before relevant import processing and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI model. AI is deliberately not used to decide rotas, clocking, payroll or leave, where configured rules remain in control.
Pricing
Care Centre is priced per registered bed rather than per employee:
- CareRota: £6 per bed per month
- CareHR: £6 per bed per month
- People Management Platform: £10 per bed per month
- Setup: £0
- Contract: monthly rolling with 30 days’ notice
The full platform combines CareRota and CareHR with additional functionality, including CareChat and CareMaintenance. Staffing numbers do not affect the price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees is charged for 60 beds.
Access HSC publishes no price for its care range: rostering is “£POA”, pricing is “case-by-case” and an annual cost “per carer, or per bed”, and a plan is “split into set-up costs and one price for the package”. The only published figure on the site is Messenger “from as little as £1.50 per user”.
Further figures are public. In the G-Cloud 14 pricing documents published by Access UK Ltd on the UK Digital Marketplace, dated May 2024, Care Rostering – Residential is priced per active employee per month, including time and attendance and billing: £11.39 at 10–25 employees, £8.06 at 25–100, £6.38 at 100–300 and £5.28 at 300–500. Care Compliance is £6.56, £4.75, £3.95 and £2.75 across the same bands. Clocking terminals are £75 each per month, with NFC fobs at £375 and sticky tabs at £175 per 25; a Customer Success plan is 15% of annual recurring revenue, or 25% for Premium; a mandatory £187.50 one-off charge applies; and implementation is £720, £2,300 or £4,000 by FlightPath level. Dated May 2024, these are last-published prices.
The comparison is therefore between a published per-bed subscription with every employee included and a quoted cost per module, with implementation and support charged separately. Care Centre’s per-bed model is designed around the employee-to-bed ratios typical of residential care.
Implementation, training & support
Both platforms are cloud-based. Care Centre requires no proprietary hardware: staff use their own phones and standard Android tablets sit within homes. It provides initial configuration, staff-data import and live training for managers and employees without a setup fee, supported by a UK-based team focused on the care sector.
Access implements through its FlightPath programme, delivered remotely at a level set by size and complexity and charged as a one-time fee; its three support plans — Essential, Standard and Premier — are priced on the G-Cloud documents as a percentage of annual recurring revenue.
The choice is between implementation and support included within the subscription and a named project with a support plan selected separately.
Where Care Centre may be the better fit
Care Centre is likely to suit organisations looking for a single platform for the care team, particularly where they:
- Operate multiple care homes and want group-wide standards with home-level settings
- Want rota budgets based on hours by care role, and the option of preventing a shift that exceeds them
- Want clock-in rules tied to the rostered shift, with control of unrostered clock-ins and approval of additional time
- Want rota, attendance, leave, payroll preparation, HR and compliance on one employee record
- Want anonymous staff, resident and family surveys, with recognition and communication in the same app
- Want maintenance management through the same platform as workforce management
- Prefer a published per-bed subscription to a quoted cost per module
Where Access HSC may be the better fit
Access HSC may be more appropriate where:
- Care planning and medication administration are required within the product, with barcode scanning and pharmacy connections
- Mock inspections and a digital audit library are required, across the Care Inspectorate, CIW and RQIA as well as CQC
- One supplier is required for care records, rostering, invoicing, payroll, eLearning, policies and screening
- A named implementation project and a chosen support plan are preferred to an included implementation
- The organisation operates beyond residential care, across home care, supported living or NHS services