Domiciliary Care Policies and Procedures: What an Agency Needs
Every policy a home care agency needs, and the handful that have no equivalent in a care home. Lone working, missed calls, keys, and medicines in someone else's house.
By HeroDocs Team
Most domiciliary care policies and procedures are written for care homes and then relabelled. That is how a home care agency ends up with a safeguarding policy that assumes a building. And with no policy at all for the things that go wrong on a visit.
This covers both: the full set you need, and the ones that only exist in domiciliary care.
Your staff are alone in someone else's home
In a care home, staff are supervised by being in the same building as somebody senior. In domiciliary care they are alone, in someone else's home, often with no signal, making judgement calls without anyone to ask.
Everything below follows from that.
The policies unique to home care
Lone working. The policy that carries the most risk, because it is the one your staff rely on when nobody else is there. It needs to cover check-in and check-out, what happens when a carer does not check in, escalation out of hours, and personal safety on visits. A policy that only says staff "should take care" is not a procedure.
Missed and late calls. What counts as late. When the office is told. Who else is told. What happens if nobody can cover, and how you tell the person and their family. The person and their family see a late call straight away. Most compliance failures are invisible to them. This one is tested in public.
Entry, keys and key safes. Who holds keys. How codes are recorded and changed. What happens when a key is lost. And what a carer does when nobody answers the door. That last one is a safeguarding decision made alone on a doorstep, so it needs a written procedure.
Medicines in someone else's home. You do not control storage, other people may administer, and family may have their own arrangements. Your policy has to cover what you administer, what you prompt, what you record, and what you do when medicines are missing or refused.
Travel and timings. Whether travel time is paid, how rotas allow for it, and what a carer does when traffic makes them late. This is a compliance issue, an employment issue, and a quality issue at once.
Out of hours and on call. Who answers, what decisions they can make, and how it is recorded. In home care, most difficult moments happen when the office is closed.
The rest of your domiciliary care policies and procedures
Beyond those, a domiciliary agency needs the same core areas as any regulated service:
Safeguarding and protection: safeguarding adults, whistleblowing, restrictive practice, modern slavery.
Care delivery: care planning and review, assessment of needs, consent, mental capacity and deprivation of liberty, end of life care, nutrition and hydration.
Staff: recruitment, induction, training and development, supervision and appraisal, disciplinary and grievance, staff wellbeing, agency and bank staff.
Health and safety: health and safety, infection prevention and control, moving and handling, violence and aggression, business continuity.
Governance and information: governance and quality assurance, data protection, confidentiality, complaints, duty of candour, accidents and incidents, equality and human rights.
Your exact list depends on your regulated activities. CQC publishes what registration requires, and that is the list to work from.
Where a care home policy will not transfer
Three examples worth checking in any pack you have inherited or bought:
Infection control. A care home policy assumes you control the environment. In home care you do not. Your policy has to be about what your staff carry, wear and do, not about cleaning schedules for premises you do not own.
Falls. A care home policy assumes staff are nearby. In home care the realistic scenario is a carer arriving to find someone on the floor, alone, possibly hours later. The procedure is different.
Visitors. A care home has a visiting policy. In home care, you are the visitor. Policies about managing visitors make no sense and signal a pack that was never adapted.
Write it for a carer on a doorstep at seven in the morning
The same rules as anywhere, with one addition.
Name real things: your on-call number, your local authority, your safeguarding lead, the software your carers open every shift.
And write the procedure for a carer standing on a doorstep at seven in the morning with no signal, because that is who needs it. If your policy cannot be followed in that moment, it is a document rather than a procedure.
How often to review
Annually for safeguarding, medicines, lone working and health and safety. Every two years for most of the rest.
Review immediately, outside the schedule, after any incident that exposed a gap, after a change in guidance, or after a regulator alert naming the topic.
Where to check the requirements
CQC publishes the registration requirements for regulated activities. Use that for the definitive list and this article for what the policies need to contain.
If you are registering rather than reviewing, start with the documents CQC wants at registration. For the care home equivalent of this list, see every policy a care home needs, and how the two differ.
Sources
CQC, the fundamental standards of care, page last updated 3 March 2026.
Last checked: 21 September 2026.