Caring Village App Review – Does Caring Village Help Caregivers?

Caring Village is promoted as an app-based organizer for caregivers. More than that, the app helps with communication between caregivers and offers plenty of important information.

In this Caring Village app review, we’re taking a close look at how the Caring Village app works in practice. We’re particularly interested in whether the app makes life easier for caregivers.

After all, you don’t want to be trying out a dozen apps in the hope of finding one that helps.

In Brief

Our Full Caring Village App Review

• What is Caring Village?
• Features of Caring Village
• Caring Village App Reviews
• Our Thoughts About Caring Village

What is Caring Village?

We’ve talked a little bit about Caring Village, so let’s look in more detail. The company makes this general claim:

The company also says that they help caregivers to:

• Electronically store important documents
• Track medications and prescriptions
• Coordinate with friends and family
• Worry less
• Ensure your loved one is safe

The biggest theme is that the app helps with communication and coordination (hence the idea of a caring village). This approach is important if multiple people are involved in caregiving or support.

There are a variety of other features too. Some aren’t as strongly related to the idea of multiple caregivers, but they all have advantages.

The app is also entirely free, which is encouraging. So, let’s dig into it some more.

Features of Caring Village

The first part of Caring Village is simple. You need to set up a new village or join one. A village is described like this:

Once you’ve done this, you’ve taken into the app itself. There is a Village Builder feature, which steps you through the key things to set up. This is pretty useful, as the app has many different sections and can be a little confusing at first.

The great thing is that you can skip various tasks (like adding in a profile picture). This is perfect if you only plan on using some parts of the app.

Caring Village does have a lot to offer. You can see what I mean from the full list of app sections:

• Wellness Journal
• Village Dashboard
• Messages
• Care Plan
• Medications
• Calendar
• To Dos
• Checklists
• Documents
• Articles
• Contacts
• Members
• Village Settings

Let’s take a look at those areas.

Wellness Journal

The Wellness Journal is basically a way to record key details about the care recipient’s day, including their mood, a photo and some text.

The journal is pretty simplistic and there are just three mood options to choose from, which doesn’t help much. Still, on the plus side, you can see trends over time. Other members are also able to make comments on journal entries.

This feature errored out the first time I used the app and I wasn’t able to make a journal entry at all. It worked much better the second time around, but errors like this can still be frustrating.

Care Plan

I wasn’t very impressed with the Care Plan aspect of Caring Village.

All you’re doing is setting up a collection of questions that caregivers can answer on a daily or a weekly basis. That’s it.

Having questions like this and recorded answers could be useful, but the idea seems simplistic for a care plan. Besides, the only answer options are Yes, No and N/A.

Checklists

The Checklists feature is a little different than the rest of the Caring Village app. As the name suggests, this section offers various checklists that focus on different aspects of caregiving.

For example, the image below is the list for Preparing a Home to Accommodate Those with Limited Mobility. It is a comprehensive list, with 50 different items.

There are also Financial and Legal Planning checklists, including the following:

• Contact Information, Personal Documentation and Information Storage (7 items)
• Financial Information & Decision-Making (11 items)
• Medical Information & Decision-Making (16 items)
• Legal and Estate Planning (14 items)

The checklists are pretty useful.

The biggest limitation is that they’re just checklists. They don’t link through to other parts to other parts of the app. They don’t seem to have a collaborative design either.

Medications

The medications section works like you might expect. You are able to record key details about each medication that the care recipient is taking, including:

• Medication name
• Dosage
• Frequency
• Currently taking the medication (Y/N)
• Start date
• Last refill date
• Refills remaining
• Medication photo

Calendar

The calendar allows you to create events with various details.

The process works as you might expect. It’s a useful feature that gives users the chance to easily see what is planned for the care recipient.

To Dos

The To Do feature is pretty cool. It allows you to set up tasks that can then be assigned to people. It’s also possible to simply put a task on the list and then see who volunteers for it.

I love this idea. My biggest problem is that there isn’t space to expand on the to-do task. This could be annoying if the task was very involved or specific in some ways.

Still, there is the chance for people to leave comments, so that’s something.

Other Features

There are a few other key areas too. One is documents, where you can upload images or files. I assume that all village members can access the documents, although the app doesn’t say whether this is the case.

This could be a really useful feature, as long as the files are secure.

I didn’t have any problems using this feature, but it does involve navigating the internal file system of your phone. You would also need to upload the files to begin with.

Doing so could be challenging for anyone who isn’t strongly tech-savvy.

There is a selection of articles (kind of like blog posts) on the app. I didn’t find these useful personally, as they just take you to a website to read them.

Finally, there are details about the different members of your village, including their contact information.

Caring Village App Reviews

Caring Village averages 3.9 stars across 21 reviews. This isn’t too bad as an average, but it’s surprising to see so few reviews.

The low number of reviews could be because this is a specialized app. Hopefully there will be more reviews as time goes on.

The positive reviews suggest that the app works fairly well and is generally useful to caregivers.

While there were negative reviews, Caring Village did respond to them promptly. Most complaints were related to problems in setting up an account or logging in.

However, none of those issues were recent. It also seems that they were related to particular updates of the app.

That being said, I did have some problems when signing up myself. The process worked in the end, but I was unsure whether it would for a while.

A couple of reviewers mentioned that the app was buggy in places. I noticed that myself too. The bugs weren’t enough to make the app unusable, but they were annoying.

Our Thoughts About Caring Village

Caring Village has a seriously impressive selection of features – especially for a free app. Like many other users, I did notice some buggy parts. These took away from my overall experience, but they wouldn’t be enough to stop me from using the app.

The other key issue is that many of the features felt incomplete.

I couldn’t help but feel that many features could be expanded so that they helped users more. For example, the to-do feature felt like it had so much potential, but what you could actually do with it was limited.

Still, it’s hard to hold these issues against Caring Village.

The app functions well enough and has a high number of features for something that is entirely free.