In early 2024, Emma Doney, Founder and Managing Director at Best Life, was facing a challenge many specialised care organisations encounter: finding training that actually meets their needs.
Unlike traditional domiciliary care providers, Best Life focuses on providing crucial support for older adults and those recovering from injury or diagnosis, without delivering regulated personal care. Their approach was born from Emma’s personal experience with her grandmother, who needed assistance managing daily tasks and maintaining her independence, but found traditional care services overmedicalised and inappropriate.
With a team of 54 companions – most in their mid-50s with rich lived experience – Best Life needed a training solution that honoured their expertise while ensuring consistent quality service. Traditional care certificate training simply wasn’t the right fit.
Enter FuturU, who offered a bespoke solution that addressed Best Life’s specific needs. In this interview, Emma shares how this partnership has improved their training approach and onboarding process, and supported their mission to help clients truly live their best lives.
How did you find out about FuturU?
I met FuturU’s Head of Learning Innovation Mark Story when we were both working at the Met Office. We both ended up working in the care sector, and Mark reached out to let me know about FuturU. My first thought was ‘oh my goodness, this sounds amazing’, because obviously training costs are huge and FuturU offered a great alternative.
Before discovering FuturU, how were you delivering training?
Previously, we tried putting our staff through loads of training that felt irrelevant. We’re not a domiciliary care provider, and much of the content covered in the Care Certificate just isn’t relevant to our team.
Our companions have lived experience of supporting someone after an injury or a diagnosis or into their later years too, so they don’t need loads of training.
That’s why a bespoke induction created in collaboration with FuturU was the perfect solution.
How easy was it to get set up with FuturU?
End-to-end, it took a couple of months. The team at FuturU was fantastic, and the process was as painless as possible. They understood that I didn’t need the whole Care Certificate and created something bespoke that works for our companions and organisation.
Our bespoke induction covers a wide range of topics including our values and what we stand for as an organisation, handling information and GDPR, safeguarding adults, health and safety, hygiene, de-escalation and challenging behaviour, dementia and employee wellbeing.
Any other training we need is done in-house – FuturU is the sole training provider we use.
What do you like most about FuturU?
How user friendly everything is. Everything’s based around making it easy for the user and us, so the customer journey, the user journey, everything, it’s just simple.
We use FuturU because it’s so quick and easy and fantastically user friendly. When we start with a companion, we’re often recruiting new people because we’re quite small and need to be nimble and agile. So we need our onboarding process to be as quick as possible. With FuturU, everyone’s up and running with the same knowledge in just a couple of hours. And the feedback from the team has been amazing.
What sets FuturU apart from other training providers?
The cost, number one. I’ve used a couple of other platforms myself, and I think the user journey is just so swish – everything’s super easy to use.
Also, the amount of content, the amount of different modules – you can literally study to your heart’s content. And you guys are super friendly!
Would you recommend FuturU to other companion care companies?
I would absolutely recommend FuturU, based on the usability of the platform and quality of the training.
