Alternatives to Tunstall for UK families
Tunstall is the UK telecare incumbent. If your parent has a pendant alarm in the house, there is a fair chance the hardware was made by them. Tunstall is genuinely good at what it does, which is the moment of a crisis. It does very little for the family on the ninety-nine days a year when nothing is wrong. This page is for the families who have realised that, and are looking at what to add.
Where Tunstall is the right thing to have
Tunstall is the largest telecare company in the country for a reason. Their kit is reliable, their monitoring centres are well-staffed, and most local authorities trust them with the equipment they hand out after hospital discharges and falls. If any of these match your situation, do not cancel.
- The council installed Tunstall after a hospital stay, and your parent does live with a real fall or seizure risk.
- Nobody in the family can reach the home within fifteen or twenty minutes, and the value of the monitoring centre dispatching an ambulance is genuine.
- The setup includes a smoke or CO sensor, which Tunstall integrates with the base unit. That is meaningful safety kit and you should not lose it.
- Your parent is comfortable with the pendant and the base unit, and the kit is being used (not in a drawer).
You can read more about their products on the official Tunstall site. If your kit was installed by your local council, the relationship is with them, not directly with Tunstall.
The gap Tunstall leaves
Talk to a hundred UK families with a Tunstall pendant in the house and you hear the same three things.
1. The family is told after, not before
The Tunstall model is built around the monitoring centre. An alarm fires, the centre calls the listed contacts. Brilliant in the moment. Useless for building any picture of how Mum is doing across a week. The family is reactive, not proactive, by design.
2. The interface (for the family) does not really exist
Tunstall is institutional software. It was built for adult social care teams and housing officers, not for the adult son or daughter who wants a small daily reassurance on their phone. There is no shared visit calendar, no daily check-in tap, no calm dashboard. Families patch this gap with WhatsApp groups, which then fragment.
3. The pendant only helps if it is worn and pressed
Same problem every pendant has. Pride, forgetting, not wanting to make a fuss. The pendant is in a drawer, or on the kitchen counter, or it is being worn but Mum did not want to press it because she did not want the ambulance. The pendant is one tool. It cannot be the only tool.
Tunstall vs Getwello, side by side
Different jobs. Both useful. Here is the gap between them.
| For… | Tunstall | Getwello |
|---|---|---|
| Built to answer | Is there an emergency right now | Is your loved one alright today |
| Who installs it | Council, housing association, or a paid contract | The family, in five minutes, online |
| Who is told when something happens | A 24-hour monitoring centre, then the family by phone | The family directly, in their app |
| What it looks like to the family on a normal day | Nothing. The system is silent. | A daily ping. A shared calendar. A clear picture. |
| Hardware | Base unit, pendant, optional sensors | None, runs on phone or browser |
| Shared visit calendar | No | Yes, with gap-day warnings |
| Contract length | Long, often a year or more, council-managed | Monthly, cancel any time |
| Where the data lives | Council or service-provider systems | UK-hosted, in the family Circle only |
| Typical cost to the family | Variable. Sometimes free via council, sometimes £15-£30 a month per person | £4.99 a month for the whole family of up to 10 |
| What the older person needs to do | Wear the pendant. Press if needed. | Open the app once a day. Tap one button. |
What Getwello adds, alongside the pendant
We have built Getwello to be the layer the institutional telecare system never quite reaches: the family.
- A daily one-tap check-in. Mum opens her phone in the morning, taps a big button, the family knows she is up and well. One second. That is the whole interaction.
- A gentle nudge if she does not. Reminder to her first. Only if she still has not checked in does the family hear about it. Nothing siren-y, nothing medical-feeling.
- A shared visit calendar. Who is going round when. Two empty days flagged before the weekend. Nobody chasing in WhatsApp.
- A written record across the weeks. When the GP conversation starts, having three months of when she checked in and when she did not is genuinely useful evidence.
- £4.99 a month for the whole family. Sits alongside whatever the council installed, replaces nothing.
What most families end up doing
The honest pattern: families with a council-installed Tunstall pendant keep it, because it works in the moment of an emergency and they would feel guilty taking it away. They add Getwello as the family layer that sits on top. Together they cover the whole day, not just the alarm event.
If you have Tunstall and the family is well-coordinated and you genuinely know how Mum is doing on a Tuesday afternoon, you may not need anything else. If the family is still asking each other "has anyone heard from Mum today" in the WhatsApp, that is what Getwello fixes.
Keep the pendant for the crisis.
Add Getwello for everything else.
A daily one-tap check-in and a shared family calendar. £4.99 a month for the whole family, first month free, cancel any time.
Related reading
- Getwello vs Careline pendant alarmsthe wider pendant category
- Getwello vs the Age UK Personal Alarm
- After a hospital dischargethe moment Tunstall is often installed