Live in care at Home – Elderly home care blog

In April of 2010 the Care Quality Commission or CQC introduced new regulations used to govern businesses that provide care to the elderly in their own home, as well as for care homes.

The regulations are essentially there to ensure standards of quality and safety and for each regulation, there is an associated outcome, and as the CQC put it “the experiences we expect people to have as a result of the care they receive“.

These regulations and the standards that apply are extremely high and require a large investment by those reputable businesses looking to adhere to these high standards, which in turn will likely push up the cost of home care for the elderly. However, as with all government legislation and departments, we are not sure whether the local councils or the government departments responsible for the funding of homecare are aware of the high costs associated with this line of work!

However, for those businesses chosing to supply carers on a ‘Self-Employed’ basis do not have to follow the rules and need not be registered with the CQC at all, which makes it a non-level playing field. So we would say ‘buyer beware’, if they take on a self employed carer from an agency, to make sure that they make sure they do all the necessary checks themselves, like referencing and Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks etc, as the agency in these cases is not duty bound to do so.