Care Home Policies and Procedures: The Full List, and How to Write Them
The policies a CQC-registered care home must hold, grouped by what they evidence, plus the structure every policy needs and what makes one fail a read.
By HeroDocs Team
A list of care home policies and procedures is easy to find and almost useless on its own. What decides an inspection is whether each policy describes your service, names real people, and matches what staff do on shift.
This covers both: the policies you need, and how to write one that survives a read.
Care home policies and procedures, grouped by what they evidence
Safeguarding and protection
Safeguarding adults. Safeguarding children, where relevant. Whistleblowing and speaking up. Restrictive practice. Positive behaviour support. Sexual safety. Modern slavery.
Care delivery
Person-centred care planning. Consent, mental capacity and deprivation of liberty. Assessment of needs. End of life care. Nutrition and hydration. Oral health. Pressure area care. Falls prevention. Re-enablement and independence.
Medicines
Medicines management. Covert administration. Homely remedies and over-the-counter medicines. PRN protocols. Specialised techniques. Transdermal patches. Medication errors and near misses.
Staff
Recruitment and selection. Staff induction. Training and development. Supervision and appraisal. Disciplinary and grievance. Agency and bank staff. Staff wellbeing. Lone working. Agency conduct and position of trust.
Health, safety and environment
Health and safety. Fire safety. Infection prevention and control. Moving and handling. Violence and aggression. Business continuity and emergency planning.
Governance and information
Governance and quality assurance. Data protection and information governance. Confidentiality and information sharing. Complaints. Duty of candour. Accidents and incidents reporting. Equality, diversity and human rights. Conflict of interest.
That is the working set most adult social care services need. Your exact list depends on your regulated activities and service type, and CQC publishes the requirements for registration. Check there rather than relying on any list, including this one.
If you are starting a service rather than reviewing one, our guide to the documents CQC wants at registration covers what to prepare first.
The structure every policy needs
Whatever the topic, a policy that reads well has the same bones:
Purpose. One paragraph. What this policy is for and what it is trying to prevent or achieve.
Scope. Who it applies to. Staff, agency, volunteers, contractors, and where.
Definitions. Only the terms that genuinely need defining. Not a glossary for its own sake.
Legal and regulatory basis. The Act, the regulation, the guidance. Name them.
Roles and responsibilities. Who does what, by job title, and who holds the decision.
The procedure. The actual steps, in order, in the sequence a staff member would follow them.
Records. What gets written down, where it is kept, and for how long.
Training. Who must be trained on this and how often.
Monitoring. How you check the policy is being followed, and how often.
Review. Date written, date of last review, date of next review, author and approver.
Sections 5, 6 and 9 are where most policies fall down. Some policies describe principles and stop there. If yours never says who does what, in what order, and how anyone checks, it is a statement of intent, not a procedure.
What makes a policy fail a read
It could belong to anyone. No service name, no real job titles, no local authority named, no reference to how your service runs. Generic policies are visible from the first page.
It contradicts another policy. Your staffing policy describes a skill mix your care planning policy assumes you do not have. Inspectors read the set, not one document.
The procedure is not a procedure. "Staff should ensure appropriate action is taken" tells nobody what to do. "The senior on duty calls the GP, records the call in the daily notes, and hands over at the next shift change" does.
Nobody owns it. No author, no approver, no review date, or a review date that passed two years ago.
Staff have never read it. A policy nobody has acknowledged is a document, not a practice. Write it so that a care assistant asked what it says can answer.
How often to review
There is no single rule, but a workable default:
Annually: safeguarding, medicines, health and safety, infection control, anything with a criminal offence attached.
Every two years: most care delivery and staff policies.
Immediately, outside the schedule: after an incident that exposed a gap, a change in law or guidance, a change to your service, or a regulator alert naming the topic.
The trigger-based reviews matter more than the calendar ones. An annual review that changes nothing is fine and should be recorded as such. A policy that survives an incident unchanged, when the incident showed it was wrong, is a finding.
Proving your staff read them
Holding the right policies is half the job. The other half is showing that the people delivering care know what is in them.
What stands up: a record of who received which policy, when, and their acknowledgement, with a date and time. What does not: a signing sheet in a folder, or a training matrix with ticks and no evidence behind them.
Test it the hard way. Not "do we have a safeguarding policy", but "what does our safeguarding policy say", asked of a care assistant on a Tuesday afternoon.
In HeroDocs this is one flow: send a policy to your team and every response is recorded with a signature and a timestamp, then tracked in one place. What you hand an inspector is the record, not a folder of signing sheets.
Where to check the requirements
CQC publishes what registration requires, and the requirements change. Use this article for structure and quality, and CQC's registration guidance for the definitive list.
Sources
CQC, the fundamental standards of care, page last updated 3 March 2026.
Last checked: 21 September 2026.