Centre-Based Care And Home Care Guidelines to Provide Better Care for Seniors

1          The Ministry of Health will be introducing a set of developmental service guidelines as a reference for centre-based care and home care providers to work towards delivering good quality care for our seniors. This is part of the MOH’s ongoing efforts to enhance the quality of care in the intermediate and long term care (ILTC) sector.

2          The two sets of guidelines were developed by two industry-led Workgroups, each comprising service providers, healthcare professionals and policy experts familiar with the respective sectors.

3          The Guidelines articulate the expected outcomes in four broad domains related to centre and home based care services as follows:

a.    Provision of holistic care services. This domain explains the importance of delivering comprehensive, coordinated and multi-disciplinary care so that clients have both their clinical and psychosocial care needs met.

b.    Safety and quality of care. This domain outlines key safety outcomes to emphasise that providers need to minimise risks such as falls and ensure that clients are cared for safely. 

c.    Dignity of care, and informed and enabling care. This domain encourages providers to give clients and caregivers more autonomy in making care decisions by considering their views in the care process and encouraging clients to be more independent ; and

d.    Organisational excellence and sustainable care. This domain highlights the importance of good corporate practices so that providers can deliver good quality care on a sustainable basis. 

4          Providers can use the two set of Guidelines for training and quality improvement programmes. MOH and the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) will be introducing a suite of programmes and initiatives to support both sectors in working towards the Guidelines, including:

a. Implementation Guides that provide greater detail on the intent and requirements behind each Guideline, and will include examples to help providers operationalise them. The Implementation Guides will be launched later this year.

b. New training programmes to raise the quality and improve the capabilities of providers in various areas (e.g. care coordination, dementia care and mental health).

c. Conduct voluntary baseline assessments in the future for providers to help them identify individual gaps and develop customised improvement strategies.

5          MOH conducted a series of consultation sessions last year with service providers, seniors and caregivers on the proposed Guidelines before finalising them. The industry and public welcomed the proposed Guidelines, and acknowledged the importance of having the Guidelines to raise the quality of care across the sectors.  

Read the Centre-Based Care And Home Care Guidelines here.