Getwello vs TakingCare (BUPA)
TakingCare, formerly PPP Taking Care, is BUPA's personal alarm service. It is one of the largest UK pendant-alarm providers and has a reasonable claim to being the most medically-positioned of them. Getwello is a different kind of tool: a daily check-in and family-coordination app rather than an emergency response service. This page is for the families weighing up which of them, or both, to put in place.
Side by side
Ten things UK families typically weigh up when they have a TakingCare quote open in another tab.
| For… | TakingCare | Getwello |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | Is there an emergency right now | Is your loved one alright today |
| Triggered by | Pressing the pendant (or a fall detector) | A daily one-tap confirmation |
| Who has to wear or carry something | The older person, every day | Nobody, the app sits on their phone |
| What the family gets on a normal day | Nothing; the system is silent | A daily ping. A shared calendar. A weekly picture. |
| If they do nothing | The system waits for an alarm | A gentle reminder, then the family is told |
| Shared visit calendar | No | Yes, with gap-day warnings |
| Hardware | Pendant or wrist alarm, base unit | None, runs on phone or browser |
| Behind the brand | BUPA-owned, UK | Independent UK company, UK-hosted |
| Typical cost | Around £19-£29 a month per person plus setup fee | £4.99 a month for up to 10 family members |
| Contract length | Often 12 months minimum | Monthly, cancel any time |
Where TakingCare is the right buy
A monitored pendant is the right answer when the worry is the moment of an event. If any of these match your situation, the TakingCare service genuinely earns its monthly cost.
- Your parent has fallen before or has a condition (low blood pressure, stroke history, balance issues) that makes a fall more likely.
- They live alone, with nobody nearby overnight, and the value of a monitoring centre dispatching an ambulance is concrete.
- You want a UK provider with the BUPA name on the contract. For some families that is genuinely reassuring; the brand counts.
- Your parent is willing to wear the pendant or wrist device. (This is the most underestimated requirement; test for a week before signing a 12-month contract.)
- You want fall detection or GPS coverage outside the home and you are happy paying the higher tier for it.
You can read about their packages on the official TakingCare site.
Where the pendant model leaves a gap
The TakingCare model, like every monitored-pendant model, is reactive. It does something when the button is pressed (or when a fall is detected). Three things this means in practice.
1. The normal day is invisible to the family
On a quiet Tuesday when nothing has gone wrong, the family knows nothing about how Mum is actually doing. The pendant is silent. No daily picture, no weekly trend, no early signal that the GP appointment last fortnight has not settled yet. The pendant tells you about events, not patterns.
2. A meaningful share of older people will not press it
Pride, confusion, not wanting to make a fuss, not wearing the device, or just forgetting it is there. The pendant is one of those things every family eventually has a story about: the afternoon Mum was on the floor and did not press it because she did not want the ambulance, the time the wrist alarm was left in the bathroom, the day the button was pressed by accident and Mum was so embarrassed she stopped wearing it for a month.
3. The family is told after, not before
The model is built around the monitoring centre. An alarm fires, the centre rings the contacts. By the time the family knows, the event has already happened. There is no shared calendar of who is visiting, no weekly digest, no flag for two empty days coming up at the weekend. The pendant is a medical-event tool. The family-coordination job is not what it does.
What Getwello does instead
- A daily one-tap check-in.Mum opens the app, taps a big "I am well" button, the family gets a quiet ping. The whole interaction takes a second.
- A gentle reminder if she forgets. Small nudge to her first. Only if she still has not checked in does the family hear about it. No monitoring centre, no phone call from a stranger.
- A shared visit calendar. Who is going round when. Two empty days flagged automatically. Coordinator, siblings, the cleaner, all on the same two-week view.
- A weekly digest by email. Sunday evening, a short summary of the week behind and the week ahead. Read it with a cup of tea, close the inbox.
- £4.99 a month for the whole family. No contract, no setup fee, no per-user charges. Pairs cleanly with a TakingCare pendant if you have one.
What most families end up doing
Families who already have TakingCare in place keep it, because cancelling a pendant alarm always feels like tempting fate, and because it does what it does well. They add Getwello as the family layer. The two products are not really competing for the same monthly cost; they are competing for different parts of the same overall worry.
If you are starting from scratch and the worry is mostly a fall, buy the pendant. If the worry is mostly the daily not-knowing, buy the check-in. If it is both, buy both. Getwello is cheap enough that the second decision is not really a budget decision.
The pendant for the alarm.
Getwello for the everyday.
A daily one-tap check-in and a shared family calendar, in five minutes. £4.99 a month for the whole family, first month free, cancel any time.
Related reading
- Getwello vs the Age UK Personal Alarmthe other big-brand UK pendant alarm
- Getwello vs Careline pendant alarmsthe wider Careline-style category
- Personal alarms vs daily check-in appsthe deeper piece on the two categories