The Care Labs Named Finalist at Kent Care Awards

Boutique Care Homes attended the Kent Care Awards 2026 as a finalist in the Technology Innovation category, recognising The Care Labs, the group’s free knowledge platform for families navigating care.

The Kent Care Awards mark eleven years of the Kent Integrated Care Alliance (KiCA) recognising the individuals, teams and organisations shaping care across the county. This year’s ceremony took place on Friday 11th September at The Great Danes Hotel in Maidstone: a black tie gala evening built around a three-course meal, the awards presentations themselves, and a late-night DJ, bringing together care professionals from across Kent to mark a year of work most families never see.

Guests arrived along a red carpet lined with stilt walkers and a black and gold balloon arch, before the ballroom filled with purple light beneath a screen reading “Kent Care Awards 2026”. Among them was Boutique Care Homes, the group behind Chartwell House in Broadstairs and Martello Manor in Hythe, there to represent The Care Labs in the Technology Innovation category.

Launched in March 2026, The Care Labs is a free, jargon-free digital knowledge platform for families navigating care decisions. No registration is required, new content is published monthly, and the platform is expanding to include podcasts, video and eLearning modules across the rest of the year. The Technology Innovation category went to another organisation on the night, but the shortlisting itself carried its own significance for the team behind it.

“This is just the beginning for The Care Labs,” said Carl Roberts, Director of Sales and Marketing at Boutique Care Homes, who originated the concept for The Care Labs and attended the evening. “Families across Kent and beyond are still navigating care decisions with far too little good information behind them, and closing that gap is exactly what we built this platform to do. Being recognised for it here reinforces that we’re heading in the right direction.”

That judgement has echoes elsewhere. The Care Labs is now the subject of a partnership with EKC Folkestone, where Level 3 Health and Social Care learners are completing structured work experience project in association with Boutique Care Homes. The project asks students to evaluate the platform against core curriculum topics, and collaborating on future content. It is the kind of outside collaboration that carries significant weight and impact to the project.

So does the response from the families the platform was built for. Rita, a care seeker from Kent, wrote to the team: “You’re making a huge contribution to helping those who, at times, feel vulnerable and uncertain. Heartfelt thanks and kind regards.”

For Ameet Kotecha, Founder and Managing Director of Boutique Care Homes, the finalist recognition reflects a wider responsibility. “Families shouldn’t have to work this hard to find good information about care. The Care Labs exists because we believe the sector has a duty to share what it knows, not guard it. Being shortlisted for that among some genuinely strong technology entries this year is a marker that we’re on the right track, and we intend to keep building on it.”

Boutique Care Homes has been named Care Home Group (Small) of the Year at the National Care Awards in both 2023 and 2025, and has featured in the carehome.co.uk Top 20 Small Care Home Group for three consecutive years. None of that happens by accident, and neither will what comes next for The Care Labs. Good care, and good information about it, should speak for itself. That’s the standard the team is holding itself to, award or no award.