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Research

The invisible workforce: who's really managing your family's health

Millions of people in the UK quietly coordinate care for parents, children and partners. The numbers behind unpaid care, and why so little is built for it.

Every family has one. The relative who knows the date of the next scan and which of Dad’s tablets got swapped last month. Ask how they keep it all straight and you’ll be shown a notebook, or a phone note titled “MUM MEDS” last edited at midnight.

That person rarely calls themselves a carer. They’re just “the one who deals with it”. Together, though, they form one of the largest workforces in the country, and one of the least supported.

Bigger than almost anyone realises

The 2021 Census counted around 5.7 million unpaid carers in the UK.1 Even that is likely an undercount: the census asks a narrow question, and many people providing regular support never think to tick the box. When Carers UK polled the public for Carers Week, they found one in five UK adults, around 10.6 million people, were supporting a relative, close friend or neighbour because of illness, disability, mental ill-health or older age.2

And it’s not a fixed group. Carers UK estimates 12,000 people become unpaid carers every day, often overnight, after a fall or a phone call.3

What is all this work worth? Researchers at the Centre for Care (University of Sheffield), working with Carers UK, valued unpaid care in the UK at £184.3 billion a year. The combined NHS budget for the same year was £189 billion. Unpaid carers are, in effect, a second NHS.4

Value of unpaid care in the UK, 2021/22 £184.3bn Combined four-nation NHS budget, 2021/22 £189bn
Source: Valuing Carers 2021/22, Centre for Care (University of Sheffield) & Carers UK, 2024. Bar lengths to scale.

Caught in the middle

The hardest-pressed carry care in both directions. The Office for National Statistics estimates there are 1.4 million “sandwich carers” in the UK: people aged 16–64 raising a dependent child while also caring for a sick, disabled or elderly adult relative.5

The same ONS analysis found that most sandwich carers (61%) are women, that around half can’t work at all or as much as they’d like because of caring, and that 31% show signs of depression or anxiety, against 24% of all adults.5

This isn’t only a British story. In the United States, 63 million adults are now family caregivers (nearly one in four, and a 45% increase since 2015); among caregivers under 50, nearly half are looking after a child and an adult at the same time.6

Enormous responsibility, almost no tooling

Here’s the strange part. This workforce coordinates medications, symptoms, appointments and specialists across multiple people, and mostly does it from memory and the kitchen drawer where the clinic letters live.

It’s not for lack of apps. A 2024 review in the Journal of Medical Internet Research looked at mobile health apps for family caregivers and reached a blunt conclusion: app-supported care coordination for families “remains a possibility, not a reality”. No existing app adequately supports caregivers managing care across family members and providers.7 Health apps assume a single patient tracking a single body. Anyone holding several bodies in their head has been designed around, not for.

What we built instead

Seenly puts a separate health profile for each of those people in one account: an ageing parent, a child, a partner, yourself. You can prepare for anyone’s visit, record it with consent when you’re in the room, and keep every summary and clinic letter attached to the right person’s timeline. It isn’t medical advice and it doesn’t replace anybody’s clinician.

An app doesn’t lift the weight of caring, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But the part where the entire system lives in one person’s memory is fixable, and it’s the part we started with. Plans and early-access pricing.

Sources

  1. Carers UK, Key facts and figures about caring (Census 2021).
  2. Carers UK, Carers Week 2022: rising pressures on unpaid carers (2022).
  3. Carers UK, 12,000 people in the UK become unpaid carers every day (2022).
  4. Centre for Care & Carers UK, Valuing Carers 2021/22: the value of unpaid care in the UK (2024).
  5. Office for National Statistics, Sandwich carers, UK: January 2021 to May 2023 (2025).
  6. AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025.
  7. Mobile Health Apps, Family Caregivers, and Care Planning: Scoping Review, Journal of Medical Internet Research (2024).