Legislative changes for adult care home and domiciliary support social care providers in response to COVID-19

The Welsh Government have introduced temporary legislative measures to support local authorities, health boards, adult care home and domiciliary support providers to respond to the pressures and challenges during the current COVID-19 emergency.

These regulations The Regulated Services (Service Providers and Responsible Individuals)(Wales)(Amendment)(Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 came into force from 5 June. Additional statutory guidance has been published by Welsh Government. This sets out more details on how providers may comply with the regulations.

These changes include:

1. Exempting emergency adult care home or domiciliary support services set up to respond to COVID-19 from registration with CIW. CIW must be notified in advance of the arrangements in order for the exemption to be valid. Any provider wishing to provide these services much use this notification form and submit it to ciwregistration@gov.wales before beginning to provide the service.
2. Relaxing requirements on providers to undertake pre-employment checks on employees in domiciliary and residential care to help accelerate recruitment of additional staff and volunteers during the pandemic. While these regulations ease some of the existing requirements on providers regarding pre-employment checks, providers must still satisfy themselves a person they intend to employ is fit and proper for the role as set out in Regulation 35 of the 2017 Regulations, albeit with these relaxations applied.
3. Relaxing the existing 15% shared rooms threshold, on a temporary basis, to enable service providers with unoccupied rooms or rooms which are not currently in use as bedrooms to increase the maximum capacity within their home, where this is needed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This can only be done with the agreement of CIW (as a variation to an existing service). We will consider each variation request on a case-by-case basis, with regard to the best interests of all the residents.

Further information about this and other frequently asked questions for care providers and staff across Wales can be found on our coronavirus (COVID-19) page and on our legislation page.