The Home Support Providers Act: what every small Irish agency needs to know

Here is a thing that always struck me as odd. A nursing home in Ireland answers to HIQA. A disability service answers to HIQA. But home support — carers going into people's houses, on their own, often with the most vulnerable clients any service sees — answered to nobody. Anyone could start an agency on a Monday morning.

That has now changed. The Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025 passed both Houses of the Oireachtas in late June 2026 and has been signed into law by President Connolly on 20/07/2026. It is now the Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Act 2026 (No. 17 of 2026) — the first law in the history of the State to regulate home support providers.

If you run a home-care agency in Ireland, this is the law that changes your paperwork. Below is what it says, when it starts to bite, and what I'd do about it if I were you — written plainly, because most of what's out there isn't.

1 · What the law actually says

The Act amends the Health Act 2007 — the same law nursing homes have lived under since 2009 — and it does three things that matter to you.

First, HIQA registration becomes mandatory. Every home support provider has to apply to HIQA's Chief Inspector of Social Services, and once the system is switched on, running an agency without being registered is an offence.

Second, HIQA can inspect you, against regulations set by the Minister and national standards set by HIQA. That is the same arrangement nursing homes have had for over fifteen years, so we can see fairly clearly how it tends to go.

Third — and this is the part people underestimate — registration is a relationship, not a form. The Chief Inspector can attach conditions to your registration, refuse it, or cancel it. You don't get registered once and forget about it.

Two other documents matter as much as the Act. HIQA's draft National Standards for Home Support Services, out since November 2024, describe the care expected of you: person-centred planning, safe medication support, trained and supervised staff, records you can actually stand over. And the regulations — the Minister's detailed rules, including the list of written policies you'll have to hold — are still being finalised. Those two are where the day-to-day work lives.

2 · Who it applies to

Everyone providing home support as a business — and that's rather the point of it. Until now, the only real rules were the HSE's own service specifications, and they only reached providers delivering HSE-funded hours. If you took private clients only, nobody was checking anything.

The Act follows the sector, not the money. HSE hours, private hours, a mix of both — assume you're in scope.

And if you're a small independent, five carers or fifteen or forty, don't wait for someone to tell you this is aimed at the big franchises. Nothing published so far contains a small-agency exemption, and I wouldn't plan on one appearing.

3 · The timeline: what happens when

Signed doesn't mean started. Health legislation like this is switched on by a commencement order, and the Department has been clear it will come in phases rather than all at once.

Treat those dates as informed guesses rather than promises — only the commencement order sets anything real. But look at the shape of it. The providers who use this runway will walk through registration. The ones who ignore it will sprint. And two years sounds generous right up until you sit down to assemble three years of records nobody ever kept.

4 · The eight things an inspector will ask to see

This is the part worth sitting with. Inspections aren't really about whether you give good care — most agencies I meet do. They're about whether you can show it, months later, to someone who wasn't there. Nursing-home inspections have worked that way for fifteen years, and the draft home support standards follow the same logic. Read across the standards and the draft regulations and it comes down to eight kinds of record.

Now hold that list up against how most small agencies actually run — a WhatsApp thread, a wall planner, a folder of spreadsheets, and a manager who remembers everything. Nothing there is wrong. It just can't be shown to a stranger eight months later. That's the real cost of this Act, and it isn't the registration fee. It's the evidence habit.

5 · What to do — this month, this quarter, this year

This month — a person and an honest picture

Put one name against this. In most small agencies that's the owner, and that's fine — it doesn't need to be a project yet, it just needs to belong to somebody rather than to "we should really".

Then read HIQA's draft standards for home support, properly, once. It's an evening, and it takes most of the fear out of the thing. Half of what worries people turns out to be what they're already doing.

Finally, go through those eight records and mark each one honestly: have it, scattered, or missing. That half-page is your whole to-do list, and it's usually shorter than people fear. Our readiness checklist is exactly that exercise, printable, if you'd rather not draw it up yourself.

This quarter — the gaps that take real time

Policies first, because they're slow. Gather what you have against the draft schedule, then start the bit everyone forgets: a simple record of which staff member has read which version. A signature and a date is enough. Doing it as you go is ten minutes; doing it retrospectively for twenty carers is a weekend.

Next, put dates on everything that expires. Garda vetting, manual handling, medication training — somewhere that will actually tell you before it lapses, not a folder you'd have to think to open.

Then deal with where records live, which is the one that really matters. Scattered is the enemy, not paper. Pick one home for care records and stop feeding the side channels. Whether that home is software or a well-kept set of folders matters far less than it being one place, used the same way every week.

This year — make inspection boring

Try this on a quiet afternoon: pick one client and one carer at random, and pull all eight records for them, cold. Time yourself. The distance between "we have that somewhere" and "here it is" is the entire inspection, and finding out now costs you an afternoon rather than a registration.

Have your registration pack quietly ready too — insurance, policies, staffing records, the governance basics. When the application window opens, roughly two hundred providers will be reaching for the same documents. Being early is worth more than being perfect.

And keep half an eye on the final standards and regulations, then re-check your gap list when they land. Or let me watch for you: one plain email a month, nothing else in it.

6 · Honest questions, honest answers

7 · Where Careloom fits, briefly

I should be straight with you about why this page exists. I build Careloom — care software made in Ireland, for small independent home-care agencies, around these particular rules rather than adapted from somewhere else. The idea is that the eight records above stop being homework: you build the rota and that's your record of planned cover, the carer ticks off a visit on her phone and that's the visit and medication record, a care-plan review notes who was in the room, and the training register nags you before a certificate lapses.

The paperwork itself — recruitment files, complaint letters — stays with you, where it belongs. Careloom is just the register that proves it exists and can find it. If you'd like to see that on a week that looks like yours, book twenty minutes with me and I'll walk you through it. You'll get me, not a sales team.

But honestly — whatever you end up using, start with the half-page gap list. It costs nothing and it's the only step everything else depends on.