The difference between healthcare assistants (HCAs) and care assistants

Is there a clear differentiation between healthcare assistants and care assistants? Since the nature of both roles overlap, it's hard to create separation between the two - which is where we come in.

A lot of people use the terms ‘healthcare assistant’ and ‘care assistant’ to describe the same role.

Although there is nothing wrong with this, since the nature of these roles overlap with each other it’s been hard to create a degree of separation between the two.

We’ve tried to create a differentiation between the two by advertising the ‘healthcare assistant’ sector on Healthjobs.co.uk, and the ‘care assistant’ sector on Socialcare.co.uk.

If you look at these two sectors side by side, you will see how they reflect each other in some way.

In the ‘care assistant’ sector, we advertise roles within social care, care homes and community care.

In the ‘healthcare assistant’ sector the roles are more clinical; hospital based HCA’s, clinical support workers and the like.

The reason we have done this is purely because of the way our system is set up, and the marketing templates will obviously differ between Healthjobs.co.uk and Socialcare.co.uk.

What does this mean for you, though?

Initially, it doesn’t affect you too much as when you register you can select both the ‘healthcare assistant’ and ‘care assistant’ sectors so you can receive job notifications for the two.

All it means for you is that you have two different sites to look for jobs - which can be quite annoying if you have to open up separate tabs to constantly compare the two.

Our clients will post their job vacancies to our sites, however because they’re on different sites it means you can’t find them all in one site, which isn’t as convenient for you.

This is where the ‘Jobs by email’ option comes in to save the day. It will collect the current vacancies relevant to your chosen sectors and then send them to your inbox.

So, if you’re interested in both ‘healthcare assistant’ and ‘care assistant’ jobs, get them both sent directly to your inbox. Easy-peasy.