Prime-Link Recruitment supplies fully vetted Healthcare Assistants and Support Workers to care homes, supported living services and healthcare providers across the UK. Temporary cover, permanent placements, and a team that answers the phone at 3am.
Shift cover, short-notice and block bookings for care settings, day and night.
→Care staff through to team leaders and registered managers, placed to stay.
→Enhanced DBS, right to work, references and training checks on every candidate.
→Mandatory training verified and refreshed, with structured client-specific inductions.
→A real person on call around the clock, for clients and for our care staff.
→Every person we place works with vulnerable people, in someone's home or a regulated service. That reality drives everything about how we recruit: who we accept, how we vet, and how we support people once they are on shift.
Enhanced DBS checks, right-to-work verification, full referencing and mandatory training evidence before anyone works a single shift. Our compliance files are built to stand up to CQC and client audit, not just to fill a folder.
We interview every candidate face to face, understand each client service before we staff it, and match on values and setting experience, not just availability. The right person in the right service stays longer and cares better.
Care does not keep office hours and neither do we. Clients and candidates reach a real consultant 24 hours a day, for short-notice cover, shift issues, or simply a question that cannot wait until morning.
We work both sides of the placement with equal care, because a placement only works when it works for everyone.
Reliable staffing for care homes, supported living, domiciliary care, children's residential services and healthcare providers.
Work that fits your life, pay that arrives on time, and a consultant who knows your name.
Our entry focus is care and support staffing, with senior and management placements as services grow with us.
Every worker we supply carries a complete, auditable compliance file. As standard:
Our placement methodology is deliberately thorough, because in care, a bad match is never just an inconvenience. Four stages, consistently applied.
We visit your service, learn your setting, your service users and your culture before we propose anyone.
Face-to-face interview, enhanced DBS, right to work, referencing and training verification on every candidate.
Values, experience and setting fit, not just availability. Structured induction so day one goes well.
Check-ins with client and worker, 24/7 on-call cover, and compliance renewals tracked throughout.
We staff services across the Liverpool City Region and down to Chester. Deliberately local, so our consultants know the services, the settings and the travel times, and can respond fast when cover is needed.
Our home base, covering the city and all districts.
Birkenhead, Wallasey, Bebington and across the peninsula.
Bootle, Crosby, Formby, Kirkby, Huyton and Prescot.
St Helens, Widnes and Runcorn.
Chester city, Ellesmere Port and surrounding areas.
Outside the shaded area? Talk to us anyway. Coverage grows with demand, and we would rather tell you honestly what we can serve well.
Vacancy rates in adult social care remain stubbornly high, but the pipeline is not the whole story. Why people leave, and what providers and agencies can actually do about it.
Read article →DBS, right to work, references, training evidence: a plain-English guide for care providers to what you should demand from any staffing agency, before the first shift.
Read article →No degree required, but plenty of heart. What the work really involves, what you will earn, what training you need, and where the role can take you.
Read article →Prime-Link Recruitment is a UK healthcare staffing agency specialising in Healthcare Assistants and Support Workers. We chose to specialise because care staffing done properly is demanding: the compliance is real, the stakes are human, and generalist agencies treating care like any other temp desk let providers and workers down.
Our model is deliberately focused. By concentrating on care and support roles, we know the settings, the training requirements, the regulatory expectations and the people. As client relationships deepen, we support the full care career ladder, from HCAs through senior support workers to team leaders, deputy managers and registered managers.
We are candid about being a growing agency. What we offer in place of size is attention: face-to-face interviews with every candidate, a personal visit to every client service, compliance files built for audit, and a phone that is answered at any hour. We would rather grow on kept promises than on volume.
Every decision starts with the people being cared for.
Shifts covered, calls returned, files complete. Reliability is the product.
Fair pay, honest treatment and real support for the people who do the work.
If a regulator asked tomorrow, every file would be ready today.
Tell us what you need and a consultant will come back to you the same working day. For urgent shift cover, call the 24-hour line.
Liverpool City Region and Chester. See our coverage map
Email your CV and we will call you back to register you properly
Ask any care provider in the UK what keeps them awake and the answer is staffing. Vacancy rates in adult social care have run far above the wider economy for years, services hand back contracts for want of staff, and every provider knows the sinking feeling of an uncovered night shift. The instinctive response is to recruit harder: more adverts, more agencies, more open days. Necessary, but it misses where most of the leak actually is.
The sector does not merely struggle to attract people. It struggles to keep them. Turnover in care roles regularly runs at several times the all-economy average, and a large share of leavers exit within their first year. Every early leaver restarts the cycle: another advert, another induction, another stranger for service users to adjust to. A sector that retained even modestly better would need dramatically less recruitment.
The reasons are well documented and remarkably consistent. Pay that competes poorly with retail and warehousing for far harder work. Rotas issued late and changed often, making family life unplannable. Thin induction, so new starters feel unsafe and unsupported in their first weeks, precisely when they decide whether to stay. And a pervasive feeling of being unvalued: interchangeable cover rather than a professional doing skilled, emotionally demanding work.
An agency serious about care can either feed the churn or help break it. Feeding it looks like sending whoever is available, wherever, with no induction and no follow-up. Breaking it looks like matching people to settings they suit, verifying training so they arrive shift-ready, checking in during the first placements, and paying promptly and fairly so care work remains worth choosing. Retention is built one well-supported placement at a time, and that is work agencies and providers do together.
Prime-Link Recruitment places Healthcare Assistants and Support Workers with a structured matching and support model designed for retention, not just coverage.
ComplianceWhen an agency worker walks into your service, you inherit their compliance. If a regulator inspects, a safeguarding concern arises, or a commissioner audits, "the agency handled it" is not a defence; providers are expected to assure themselves that agency staff meet the same standards as their own. So before any worker starts a first shift, you are entitled to see a complete file, and any agency that hesitates to produce one is telling you something important.
How do you track expiry dates, and what happens when a DBS or training certificate lapses mid-placement? Do you interview candidates face to face or hire from a form? Will you send the full compliance pack before the first shift as standard, or only on request? Can we see a sample file now? The answers separate agencies that treat compliance as the foundation of the service from those that treat it as paperwork to be survived.
An informed client is our favourite kind. The checks above are exactly what we assemble for every Prime-Link worker, tracked through renewal so nothing lapses quietly. We would rather compete in a market where every provider demands this standard, because the alternative, a race to the fastest and cheapest warm body, fails the people the whole sector exists to serve.
Prime-Link Recruitment supplies a complete compliance pack for every worker, before the first shift, as standard.
CandidatesYou do not need a degree to become a Healthcare Assistant, and you do not need years of experience to start. What you need is dependability, physical and emotional stamina, and genuine regard for people at vulnerable moments in their lives. If you have those, care offers something increasingly rare: immediate work, real skills, and a ladder you can climb without student debt.
Depending on the setting, a care home, supported living, someone's own home, or a hospital ward, a typical shift includes helping people wash, dress and eat; supporting mobility and using equipment safely; observing and reporting changes in someone's condition; keeping accurate notes; and, just as importantly, conversation, dignity and companionship. It is physical work. It can be emotionally heavy. It is also, on the good days, some of the most directly meaningful work there is.
Starting pay for HCAs is typically modest, close to national living-wage levels, rising with experience, nights, weekends and seniority. Agency work adds flexibility: you choose shifts that fit your life, which suits students, parents and anyone balancing commitments. The honest bits: shifts can be long, some days are hard, and you will care about people you sometimes lose. Most people who stay say the meaning outweighs the difficulty; the ones who thrive are the ones who ask for support when they need it.
Care has a real ladder: HCA to Senior Support Worker to Team Leader, then Deputy and Registered Manager, or sideways into nursing via apprenticeship and nursing associate routes. Every registered manager once did their first nervous shift. If you are considering it, talk to us; we will tell you honestly whether it is for you, help with the checks and training, and find you a setting that suits how you want to work.
Prime-Link Recruitment registers new and experienced care staff, with free support through DBS, references and training verification.