Public Consultation on Home Care Guidelines and Centre-based Care Guidelines

1.            As part of MOH’s ongoing efforts to enhance the quality of care in the intermediate and long term care (ILTC) sector, MOH intends to introduce a set of guidelines each for home care services and centre-based care services for seniors.

2.            Home and centre-based care play critical roles in helping our seniors to age more comfortably within their own communities. Home care supports seniors to age at home by providing health and personal care services at the convenience of their homes, while centres provide a convenient venue in the community where seniors can have access to a range of health, social and personal care services during the day.

3.            Two committees comprising service providers, healthcare professionals and policy experts were convened to draft a set of guidelines for each sector. The proposed guidelines reflect many existing good practices in the sectors, and set out clearly the standard of care that all centre-based care and home care providers should aspire to achieve.

4.            Both the home care and centre-based care guidelines describe what constitutes good quality care, in terms of delivering holistic and safe care, the dignity afforded to seniors and the organisational systems and management processes of healthcare providers.

5.            The guidelines are intended to be developmental in nature; that is, to serve as a basis for training and capability enhancement programmes for providers of home and community care. AIC (Agency for Integrated Care) will be developing an interpretation guidebook to explain the intent of the guidelines and provide sample tools and checklists. AIC will also develop training roadmaps and curricula to help service providers build up their capabilities in the areas articulated in the guidelines.

6.            We will launch a public consultation from 2 September to 2 October 2014 to gather views and feedback on the proposed home care and centre-based care guidelines.

7.            All feedback on the home care and centre-based care guidelines should reach the Ministry by 2 October 2014. The public can email their feedback to MOH_CareGuidelines@moh.gov.sg or send it by post to:

“Feedback on Home Care and Centre Care Guidelines”
Ministry of Health
College of Medicine Building
16 College Road
Singapore 169854

8.            We target to finalise the guidelines by end of 2014 after taking in comments from stakeholders during public and industry consultations.