Policies Required by CQC for a Care Home: The Complete Checklist

Care homes carry additional responsibilities around premises and equipment. Fire safety, food safety and nutrition, moving and handling, and clinical waste disposal all need dedicated policies that reflect the physical environment you manage.

Nursing homes carry extra clinical governance requirements. Medicines management sits at a higher tier, with policies for controlled drugs, syringe drivers and covert administration. Tissue viability, catheter care and end-of-life care policies are expected where those services are delivered.

Regulation 9A covers visiting in care homes, a relatively recent addition. Dedicated policies for visiting in and out of the home, and for visiting during an outbreak of infectious illness, are now expected. 

The duty of candour under Regulation 20 requires a policy that is understood by every member of staff, not just the management team. If a carer cannot explain what candour means in practice, the policy is not alive.

Policies for Domiciliary Care, Supported Living and Complex Care

Domiciliary care providers need policies that reflect care delivered in people's own homes. Lone working, travel and mileage, keys and access, and working in unregulated environments all matter. Medication support differs from care homes: staff may be supporting self-administration rather than managing a controlled drug cupboard. The policy must reflect that reality.

Supported living services need policies around tenancy rights, housing legislation, and the boundary between care and support. Complex care providers need policies for clinical procedures delivered in community settings, plus escalation pathways when a person's condition changes.

The same regulatory baseline applies across all service types, but the operational policies must match the setting. A domiciliary care provider with a care home's medication policy is carrying a compliance risk, not evidencing compliance. 

Inspectors notice when a policy describes a building you do not operate and a service you do not deliver.

The Policies Everyone Forgets (and Why)

The forgotten set is where inspections get uncomfortable. These are the policies that are not in the obvious list but routinely surface when something goes wrong or when an inspector asks a question nobody prepared for.

Whistleblowing gets missed because it feels uncomfortable to write. It means formally setting out how staff can raise concerns without fear, and that means acknowledging that concerns might exist. Inspectors expect to see it, and it needs to be there.

Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards gets missed because it feels like a legal specialist's job. But care staff need to know when to flag a restriction, whether it is a locked door, a sensor mat or a decision made on someone's behalf.

Data protection and GDPR get missed because it is filed under "IT stuff". It is not, and it shouldn't be overlooked (especially with DSPT being part of the CQC guidelines). It is a regulatory requirement with serious consequences, and it covers everything from how you store care records to how you share information with families.

Business continuity gets missed because it is not a care policy. But inspectors want to know what happens if the building floods, the heating fails, or a key system goes down. A care service that cannot answer that question is not fully safe.

Equality impact assessments get missed because the equality policy exists, so the box feels ticked. But the assessment process is what shows the policy is actually applied, not just written down.

Keeping Policies Alive After Registration

A policy that sits in a folder is not compliance. The gap between documented policy and practised reality is the most common reason providers struggle at inspection. You can have the most complete list of care home policies in the country and still fail on evidence if staff cannot access them when they need them.

Staff need to be able to access policies in the moment, not after a shift ends (although having access when a shift ends can help staff learn more about the policies in their own time). The 3am question is the real test of whether your policy library works. If a night shift carer cannot find the answer to a clinical question without waking the manager, the policy is not operational. It is archival.

Policy reviews need a schedule, named owners and evidence. A review date in the header is not the same as a documented review that shows what changed and why. Inspectors can tell the difference.

Staff sign-off matters, but only if it is meaningful. A signature on a form does not prove understanding; a question answered correctly does. That is why every query and training completion should be logged into an audit trail you can show an inspector.

Version control is a quiet killer. If staff can find an outdated policy, the current one is not your operational standard. One old printout in a kitchen drawer can undo months of careful work.

How to Know Where You Stand

Reading a checklist tells you what should exist. It does not tell you what is missing from your actual policy library. The difference between a list and an audit is comparison: your current policies against the expected set for your service type and regulated activities.

CareStream's Policy Gap Detection does exactly that. It compares your uploaded policy library against the expected set for your service type and names what is absent. No guesswork, no generic advice, just a clear answer.

Every query your staff ask is logged, which means unanswered questions become visible. If staff keep asking the same thing, that is a policy gap, not a training problem. The evidence builds itself, and you know where you stand before an inspector asks.

Conclusion: Know Where You Stand Before Someone Else Tells You 

The gap this article keeps returning to is not between what CQC requires and what you have written. It is between what you have written and what your staff can actually reach. 

CareStream closes both ends of it. Policy Gap Detection compares your uploaded library against the expected set for your service type and regulated activities, and names what is missing, not a generic checklist, but a specific answer about your service. 

The Staff Hub then makes what you do have reachable in the moment it matters: a night carer opens it on their own phone, asks a question in their own language, and gets an answer drawn only from your current policy, with the source shown. Version control stops being a quiet killer, because there is one live copy and no kitchen-drawer printout competing with it. 

Every query is logged, which turns your staff's own questions into two things at once: an audit trail you can hand an inspector, and an early warning system, because three carers asking the same question about covert administration is telling you something your documentation has not yet said. None of this replaces the registered manager's judgement, the review schedule, or the named policy owner. It just means that when the inspector asks how you know your policies are alive, you are describing a record rather than a hope.