Every great organisation begins with a human truth. For Unicare, that truth was a father’s love for his son.
Founded in 2019, Unicare’s origins lie not in a boardroom or a business plan, but in the quiet, grinding reality of a family searching for the right support. When Rashied Shote relocated to Kingswood, Surrey, he carried with him something no professional credential could prepare him for: the daily reality of raising Reign, his son, born with cerebral palsy. Finding the right carer — someone with the skill, the patience, the genuine compassion that complex care demands — proved almost impossible. Even offering rates of £18 to £20 per hour, well above the market norm, the right people simply did not come. The system, in short, was failing his family.
Rather than accept that failure, Rashied asked a question that would change everything: Why not build it yourself?
Rashied was not starting from nothing. His career had been built on decades of health and social care training and consultancy — work that had taken him through NHS corridors and into private healthcare organisations across the country. He had shaped the practice of countless professionals. He understood, better than most, what good care actually looked like.
So when he founded Unicare, he brought that entire body of knowledge with it. The carers he recruited were not simply placed — they were trained to the highest industry standards, shaped by a founder who had spent years defining what those standards should be. Word spread quickly. The same organisations Rashied had once supported through consultancy began to call: could he supply them with staff, too?
And so the seeds of something larger were planted. Unicare became a recruitment agency supplying care homes, nursing homes, residential services, and domiciliary providers — not as a transactional staffing business, but as a quality-led operation where every worker remained part of the Unicare family.
Behind every great partnership lies a shared history — and the story of Unicare’s transformation is, at its heart, the story of two old friends finding each other again.
Rashied Shote and Bonsu Sekyere first met as young men at Prempeh College, one of Ghana’s most distinguished secondary schools. They were formed by the same institution, shaped by the same values, and went on to carve out their own paths in the United Kingdom — Rashied in health and social care training and consultancy, and Bonsu in the operational leadership of some of the country’s most significant care organisations. Bonsu’s career had taken him through roles as Operations Manager at Care UK and Allied Healthcare, before rising to become Operations Director at Better Healthcare — a company that grew substantially across the country before being sold in the aftermath of Covid. With that chapter closed, Bonsu stepped away from the sector, turning his attention to early retirement, real estate, and property development.
For a time, both men travelled their own roads. Then, in 2018, after years apart, they reconnected. Rashied could see immediately what Bonsu’s experience and vision represented — not just for Unicare, but for the people the organisation could serve.
The decisive moment came in March 2023, when the two travelled together to Ghana. Somewhere between the conversations, the reflection, and the perspective that only a return home can offer, something shifted. Rashied made his case. He painted a picture of what Unicare could become with Bonsu’s experience alongside him. By the time they returned to the UK, the decision had been made: Bonsu would join Unicare fully and help reimagine what the business could be.
He came on board in June 2023 — and the transformation that followed has been profound. The business expanded its reach, deepened its expertise, and built a substantial and experienced staffing base capable of supporting some of the most complex and vulnerable individuals in the country.
There is one question that Rashied and Bonsu return to above all others when assessing the care Unicare delivers — a question that is at once deeply personal and uncompromisingly professional:
Is this the sort of care we would provide to Reign?
For Rashied, Reign is not a symbol or a metaphor. He is his son. And that question — simple, direct, and impossible to hide from — sets the standard against which every decision, every placement, and every interaction is measured. Anything that falls below it is not acceptable. That shared commitment, between two men who have known each other since boyhood, is the quiet engine that drives Unicare forward.
Together, Rashied and Bonsu looked at what Unicare had become and dared to imagine something more ambitious. A recruitment agency was valuable — but what families like Reign’s truly needed was not just staff. It was provision. It was a complete rethinking of how vulnerable people are supported. They entered the tender market. Local authorities in Surrey, Brighton, Greenwich and beyond began to take notice. With that momentum, a formal transformation followed: Unicare Recruitment became Unicare Complex Care Specialist Ltd — a name that carried both a promise and a purpose. The new Unicare was built around three carefully chosen areas of focus, each reflecting a gap in the system that both founders had witnessed first-hand.
The first was complex and clinical care — supporting individuals, both young and adult, living with autism, learning disabilities, mental health challenges, and behaviours that challenge. This extended to those with clinical complexities: people dependent on PEG feeding, tracheostomies, or catheter care, supported not in institutions, but in their own homes and communities, where dignity is preserved and life can still be lived fully.
The second was supported living — acquiring and developing properties where people with autism, mental health conditions, learning disabilities, and neurodivergent needs could live with genuine independence, underpinned by Positive Behaviour Support and trauma-informed approaches that treat every resident as a whole person, not a set of presenting risks.
The third was SEND and alternative provision — perhaps the most personal of all. Drawing on Rashied’s background in education, Unicare extended its reach to young people who had fallen through the cracks of the mainstream system: those excluded from school, unable to access specialist education, or simply overlooked. Through qualified tutors and teaching assistants, Unicare brought learning back to them — in their homes, in their communities, on their terms.
What began as one father’s search for a single carer for his son has grown into a specialist organisation operating across Sussex, Surrey, and Berkshire — with an experienced, committed workforce supporting some of the most complex and vulnerable individuals in the country.
Unicare was not built from a spreadsheet. It was built from lived experience, from frustration turned into purpose, and from the unshakeable conviction — shared between two old school friends reunited by a shared calling — that every person, regardless of the complexity of their needs, deserves care that truly sees them.
That conviction has not changed. It never will.
We are grateful for Jennifer from Unicare. She is a “God sent”. She engaged positively with our son. Jennifer was genuinely interested in what she was doing with our son, and our son was really happy with the time spent with Jennifer. Thank you Unicare
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