Home care governance: Insights report

Introduction

We do targeted reviews to help providers understand their financial and prudential responsibilities. These reviews help us to identify risks and improve provider compliance.

This targeted review focused on home care governance.

Our report explains what the review included, our findings and further actions we will take.

Background

From April to June 2025, we reviewed 30 providers across Australia.

We assessed their compliance with:

their obligation under Section 61-1 and Section 56-2 of the Aged Care Act 1997 to have a Home Care Agreement with each person they provide home care to. An agreement needs to include, for example:
- home care package levels and the type of services you can provide
- when or how you can change the agreement.
the governance requirements under Aged Care Quality Standard 8: Organisational governance (Quality Standard 8). For example, that providers must make sure:
- their governing body encourages a culture of safe, inclusive and quality care and services
- the organisation follows good risk management practices.
the strengthened governance responsibilities that apply to their governing body. Unless exempt, making sure, that:
- they set up a quality care advisory body (QCAB)
- the QCAB membership meets the requirements in the Aged Care Act 1997.

The governance requirements and obligations are legislated in the:

From 1 November 2025, providers will need to comply with governance responsibilities in:

Aged Care Act 2024
Financial and Prudential Standards 2025
Aged Care Rules 2025
strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards.

Our findings

Most providers were compliant. However, some providers didn’t:

meet some of the requirements for preparing home care agreements, such as explaining:
- their policies and practices for setting home care package fees
- the care and services the older person would receive
have a governing body that met the requirements
have a quality care advisory body that met the requirements
meet some of the requirements of Quality Standard 8.

The most common areas of non-compliance related to:

governing bodies
quality care advisory bodies
consumer advisory bodies.

We worked with non-compliant providers to fix these issues. They all made changes right away to meet their governance responsibilities. For example, by:

changing their home care agreements
updating their advisory body documentation
updating their quality care advisory body policy.

By the end of the review, providers felt confident they could identify governance-related non-compliance risks and fix them.

Things to consider

Governance

Do you have a governing body, consumer advisory body and quality care advisory body? Do they meet membership requirements?
Does your governing body encourage a culture of safe, inclusive and quality care and services?
Do you have a written governance framework that you regularly review?
Do you have policies and procedures to make sure home care package agreements meet the requirements?
Do you regularly identify, assess, evaluate and manage your compliance risks?

Staff

Do your staff have the right qualifications, skills and experience?
Do your staff understand their roles and responsibilities?
Do you regularly train your staff on changes to legislation and procedures?

Oversight

Do you supervise your privacy, confidentiality and subcontracting arrangements?
Do you have a Continuous Improvement Register?
Do you use software that supports good governance? For example, do you use systems that reduce duplication errors and include compliance requirements?

Older people

Do you have systems to:
record the health of people in your care
manage people’s medication
make sure the care you provide meets the Quality of Care Principles?

Commission actions

We’ll keep guiding and educating you on your governance responsibilities.
We’ll tell you about changes that will happen after the new Aged Care Act starts on 1 November 2025.
We might do more targeted reviews on prudential or governance responsibilities in the future.
We’ll use the information we collect from these reviews to improve the way we identify risks.