Guidance
This guideline covers the planning and delivery of person-centred care for older people living in their own homes (known as home care or domiciliary care). It aims to promote older people's independence and to ensure safe and consistently high quality home care services.
The Care Quality Commission uses NICE guidelines as evidence to inform the inspection process.
Recommendations
The guideline includes recommendations on:
- ensuring care is person centred
- providing information about care and support options
- planning and reviewing home care and support
- delivering home care, including recommendations on the length home care visits
- joint working between health and social care
- ensuring safety and safeguarding people using home care services
- recruiting, training and supporting home care workers
Who is it for?
- Health and social care practitioners
- Home care provider organisations
- Home care managers and workers
- Older people using or planning to use home care services, and their carers
Commissioners of home care services should ensure any service specifications take into account the recommendations in this guideline.
Is this guideline up to date?
We checked this guideline in December 2017. We found no new evidence that affects the recommendations in this guideline.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.