Business Continuity Planning for Domiciliary Care Agencies

Your service users depend on you. If something disrupts your ability to deliver care, the consequences are not just commercial. People who rely on your agency for personal care, medication, and daily living support are put at risk. A business continuity plan is the document that sets out how your agency will continue to operate, or safely transfer care, when things go wrong.

CQC expects every domiciliary care agency to have a business continuity plan. It is inspected under the Well-Led key question and is increasingly scrutinised following the disruptions caused by the pandemic, severe weather events, and staffing crises across the sector.

Why Domiciliary Care Needs a Specific Approach

Business continuity planning for domiciliary care is different from most other businesses because your "product" is keeping vulnerable people safe in their own homes. You cannot simply close for the day and reopen tomorrow. If your care workers cannot get to service users, those people may not receive essential medication, personal care, or food and drink. For some service users, a missed visit is a safeguarding concern.

Your plan must reflect this. It is not about protecting revenue or resuming operations. It is about ensuring continuity of care for vulnerable people.

Risk Scenarios Your Plan Must Cover

Your business continuity plan should identify and plan for the following scenarios as a minimum:

• Staff shortages: caused by illness outbreaks (including pandemics), mass resignation, or an inability to recruit. This is the most common disruption in domiciliary care.
• Severe weather: snow, flooding, or extreme heat that prevents care workers from travelling to visits.
• Technology failure: loss of your care management system, phone lines, or internet access.
• Loss of premises: fire, flood, or other damage to your office or base.
• Loss of a key person: sudden unavailability of the registered manager, nominated individual, or other key staff.
• Utility failure: power outages affecting your office operations or service users' homes.
• Data breach or cyber attack: loss of access to service user records, staff records, or communication systems.
• Supply chain disruption: inability to obtain PPE, medication, or other essential supplies.

What Each Scenario Plan Should Include

For each identified risk, your plan should document the trigger (what defines the event as a business continuity incident), the immediate actions to take, who is responsible for each action, the communication plan (who needs to be told, including service users, families, staff, commissioners, and CQC), the resources available (backup staff, mutual aid agreements with other agencies, alternative premises), the prioritisation framework (which service users must be visited first), and the recovery plan (how you return to normal operations).

Prioritising Service Users

When your capacity is reduced, you cannot visit everyone. Your plan must include a framework for prioritising service users based on the risk to them if care is not delivered. The highest priority is typically service users who live alone, have no informal support, require medication administration, or have complex health needs. Service users who have family or other support available, or who receive visits primarily for companionship, may be lower priority in an emergency.

This prioritisation must be documented in advance, not decided in the middle of a crisis. Each service user's priority level should be recorded in their care plan and reviewed regularly. When a business continuity event occurs, you need to be able to identify immediately who must be visited and in what order.

Mutual Aid Agreements

One of the most effective business continuity strategies is a mutual aid agreement with another domiciliary care agency. This is a formal arrangement where two or more agencies agree to share staff or take on each other's service users during an emergency. The agreement should specify how it is activated, what information is shared (with appropriate data protection safeguards), how staff are deployed, and how costs are managed.

CQC views mutual aid agreements positively because they demonstrate proactive planning. If you do not have one, your plan needs to explain how you would source additional staff or arrange alternative care provision at short notice.

Communication Plan

Your plan must include a detailed communication plan covering how you will contact service users and their families, how you will contact all staff including those not on shift, how you will notify commissioners and local authority teams, when and how you will notify CQC, and who is the designated spokesperson in the event of media interest.

Having up-to-date contact details is essential. If your emergency contact list has not been updated for months, it will fail you when you need it most.

Testing Your Plan

A business continuity plan that has never been tested is a plan that will probably fail when it is needed. CQC expects you to test your plan regularly. This can be done through desktop exercises (talking through a scenario with your team), partial simulations (testing specific elements such as the communication cascade), or full simulations (running through an entire scenario in real time).

After each test, document what worked, what did not, and what changes you will make. Update the plan accordingly. For more on governance and documentation expectations, see our registered manager documents guide. For broader policy requirements, see our CQC registration documents guide.