The Wired Care Home: Making Technology Safe For Residents

If a hotel handed every guest a key but fitted no lock to the door, and then pointed to the closed door as proof of security, we would call that a promise the building could not keep. We would not call it hospitality.

Yet that is the arrangement in a great many care homes. Wifi, tablets and video calls are now offered as standard comfort, and residents are encouraged to use them to see family, join a virtual appointment or pass an afternoon. What is often missing is the lock: a connection that holds, a device that belongs to one person, and somebody on shift who knows how to help.

The Communications Consumer Panel, which studied whether residents' communications needs are actually met, found that many homes offer only a basic connectivity package. That means communal landline phones, a television in the room with Freeview, and home-wide wifi that is often unreliable. Communal devices are hard to access and deprive residents of privacy when they make a call. Where a resident does have good connectivity, the panel found it is usually a family member who arranged it.

Key Statistics

• 24 million: email scams reported in the UK as of January 2024
• 83%: share of UK adults without home internet who are aged 65 or over
• 1.8 million: over-65s scammed online in the past year, at an average loss of £831
• 61%: people aged over 65 who have been the target of fraud or a scam
• 1.7 million: people aged 75 and over who do not use the internet at all
• £12 million: government funding for carer courses and qualifications, announced in April 2025
• 4.2 million: fraud incidents recorded in the year to March 2025, a rise of 31%

The Basic Package

The panel's study is the right place to start because it asked the question the sector tends to skip. Its conclusion was that the care landscape does not meet many people's needs around connection. Many residents are digitally excluded and unable to participate in the outside world because of a lack of basic infrastructure: good wifi, phone signal throughout the home, and the right devices.

It also found the belief that stops change. Many staff interviewed felt that residents would not necessarily benefit from improved connectivity, and there were few examples available to them showing the difference it could make. That is not negligence. It is a gap in evidence and in training, and it closes as soon as somebody demonstrates what the screen can do.

The Lock On The Door

Security is the part that gets deferred. Care England's guidance for homes sets out the risks plainly: data breaches exposing resident and staff records, ransomware that encrypts critical files until a ransom is paid, phishing messages that trick staff or residents on the wifi into sharing information, and network weaknesses in outdated hardware and software.

The scale of the phishing problem is not hypothetical. As of January 2024, more than 24 million email scams had been reported in the UK.

The sector's own advice is unglamorous: encrypted wifi networks with strong passwords, updates applied, and passwords that are not shared, written down, or stored outside a password manager. A care home that hands out a tablet without securing the network has not given anyone access to the world. It has given them access to whoever else is on that network.

What The Screen Is For

The Welsh Government's good practice guide for care homes, published in October 2025, starts with why rather than what. Digital tools keep residents connected to families, provide a platform for virtual consultations with health services, and keep people occupied and engaged in meaningful activity.

The guide lists the benefits as residents report them: maintaining relationships, calm, entertainment, potential physical health improvements, improved wellbeing, and having something to do. Loneliness and isolation cause stress and anxiety, and digital tools help residents maintain relationships with people outside the home.

One home quoted in the guide used tablets to celebrate Sir Tom Jones turning 80, running a quiz about him and playing his music videos across the decades. The guide's comment is the point of the whole document: that activity would not have been possible before.

The Building Blocks

The guide also sets out what has to be in place first, and none of it is expensive. Staff and leadership buy-in, because not everyone is comfortable with technology and some feel they are not confident using it. A quality internet connection, which the guide acknowledges is a challenge when you do not know where to start. Devices such as tablets. And a Digital Champion.

That last idea is the most transferable in the document. A Digital Champion helps others build confidence and skills, and does not need to be an expert. They need basic digital skills and the patience, enthusiasm and willingness to help. There may already be someone in the home who fits.

The guide points homes towards gigabit broadband voucher schemes that could fund the connection, and towards Age UK's Digital Champion Programme as a working model of how volunteers are trained and deployed.

The Money And The Training

The government has started to put money behind the skills gap. In April 2025 the Department of Health and Social Care announced a new qualification to equip care leaders to use and deploy technology across care homes. It covers motion sensors that alert staff when someone has fallen, video telecare for remote appointments, and artificial intelligence that automates note taking or predicts care needs. It came with £12 million to fund courses and qualifications for carers.

Wes Streeting, then Health and Social Care Secretary, said the aim was to harness technology to help people live independently in their own homes and improve the quality of care.

The Digital Care Hub provides free information and guidance to providers making the transition. The tools exist, and the funding has started. The gap is who teaches the staff to use them, and who is accountable when nobody does.

What Needs to Happen

Treat connectivity as infrastructure, not a perk: A communications package that stops at a communal phone in the corridor is not a service. It is a gesture.

Give every home a Digital Champion: The Welsh model works because it does not require an expert, only somebody patient with basic skills and the time to sit with a resident while they learn.

Train the staff before the residents: The £12 million and the new qualification are the right shape. Skills are the bottleneck in this sector, not the hardware.

Make privacy the default: A shared tablet in a corridor is not a way to speak to your daughter. Devices should belong to a person, and a call should not require an audience.

Secure the network before handing over the device: Care England's advice is cheap, unglamorous and effective. It should be the condition of offering residents wifi at all.

A care home that offers wifi but not safety, devices but not privacy, and screens but not skills has not connected anyone to the world. It has given them a window they cannot open.

Key Data Summary

Methodology

This analysis draws on:

• Consumer research: the Communications Consumer Panel's study of whether the communications needs of residents in care homes are being met, which examined availability, affordability, flexibility and security of services in residential settings.
• Sector guidance: Care England's guidance on internet security measures in care homes, published 29 July 2024, and the Welsh Government's digital good practice guide for care homes, published 1 October 2025.
• Government policy: the Department of Health and Social Care's announcement of a digital leadership qualification for care leaders and £12 million of funding for carer qualifications, published 9 April 2025.
• Provider bodies: the Digital Care Hub's free guidance for adult social care providers on making the most of digital technology.
• Charity and regulator data: Age UK's digital inclusion briefing; Ofcom's Media Use and Attitudes report as reported in April 2026; Good Things Foundation and Virgin Media O2's research on online scams, published 7 October 2025; and the Office for National Statistics' fraud and computer misuse figures for the year ending March 2025.

All figures are reported as stated by the organisations named. Where a proportion is quoted, it is the proportion reported by the source rather than one calculated here.