Lessons in Innovative Home Care Leadership and Inclusion

Amrit Dhaliwal explores the reinvention of UK home care through entrepreneurial vision, purposeful franchising, and a steadfast commitment to dignifying care workers while championing prevention, inclusion, and sustainable well-being for all.

In this powerful episode of The Inclusion Bites Podcast, Joanne Lockwood is joined by Amrit Dhaliwal to explore how compassionate care can be scaled across the UK through entrepreneurial innovation. The discussion begins with the personal motivations behind entering the social care sector and swiftly moves into the structural challenges facing both providers and recipients—including unsustainable government funding, undervaluation of care workers, and the complexities families face when navigating the care system. Joanne shares first-hand experiences as a family member procuring domiciliary care, painting a vivid picture of the gaps between intention and reality, while Amrit details the shifts needed to professionalise and rebrand the care sector, elevate careers, and centre the user’s dignity and independence.

Amrit is a dynamic entrepreneur and the CEO of Wolfinch, a purpose-led franchising model transforming home care provision across the UK. Inspired by both his wife’s and his own family’s lived experience, Amrit broke away from traditional hospitality ventures and established a successful home care franchise built on quality, values-based recruitment, and sustainable business practice. His vision extends into social impact, professionalisation of care roles, and advocating for a reimagined funding structure that rewards innovation, retention, and upskilling. Amrit’s work is fuelled by the belief that scalable, quality care should empower both the cared-for and those who deliver it.

Joanne and Amrit dissect the root causes of care sector instability—from restrictive 15-minute local authority contracts to public misunderstandings about the breadth and skill within social care roles. They highlight the importance of prevention, workplace flexibility for family carers, and the need for policymakers to shift their focus from lifespan to healthspan. Amrit discusses franchise-led solutions to empower new entrants into home care, rooted in community engagement, robust training, and equitable business models.

A key takeaway from this episode is that transforming social care requires disrupting outdated paradigms while recognising the human side of scalable, compassionate services. For listeners navigating care for loved ones or interested in innovative, values-driven business models, this conversation provides both practical insights and a rallying cry for meaningful social change.

Turning Point: “But when I think about the time and the emotional investment, the financial reward just wasn’t really there comparatively.”

Social Care Funding Crisis: “the government’s really kind of left us to our own devices. We get paid through local authority contracts, a rate that is not sustainable and is not reasonable. You know, we can’t run sustainable businesses from that”

Viral Topic: Redefining Home Care

Viral Topic: The Challenges of Short Care Visits

Scaling Solutions in Domiciliary Care: “And I think really that for me is all part of creating, creating a solution because we all know the problem and certainly if you’re within the sector, you know what the problems are and we can sit and we can talk for an hour about all of the problems that are there, which is vast, or we can actually start taking some action and saying, well, okay, what am I doing differently as a provider? Am I charging enough so I can pay my staff enough?”

Viral Topic: Solving Staffing Challenges in Home Care

Retention Crisis in Home Care Recruitment: “he’s getting 10 people in but then losing nine and then having a net growth of one.”

Empowering Care Workers Through Upskilling: “Why can we not give the care workers some of the most responsible work within the business? Because they are the ones that are out there the whole time. You know, the only thing stopping us is upskilling them.”

Viral Topic: Building Muscle Mass for Healthy Ageing: “And it’s really talking to people at much earlier age and stage when they’re fitter, healthy and so on, say well, you know, what are we doing to increase bone density, increase muscle mass? You know, when we’re talking about your, your father or father in law that had the fall, you know, it’s, it’s really then saying, well, okay, have I really worked on, in the early years on my quads, my glutes and really kind of made that strong enough because I know that after a certain age or you know, even after the age of like 40, the deterioration is going to increase, the muscle mass is going to decrease and so I’m left in a much kind of weaker position.”

Viral Topic: Rethinking Ageing

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