Start-ups · Day care service
Day Care Service Registration
A day service needs CQC registration only if it provides personal care. Activities, meals, transport and company do not require it. The most useful thing we do on this one is sometimes tell you not to apply.
The question is whether you cross into personal care
Personal care is the regulated activity: help with washing, bathing, dressing, toileting or eating, provided because someone cannot do it unaided. A day service that provides social contact, activities, a hot meal and transport is not, on that basis alone, carrying out a regulated activity.
A great many day services therefore sit legitimately outside registration. Some drift into it as their members age — the first time a staff member routinely helps someone to the toilet or with eating, the position may have changed even though nothing was ever formally decided.
The consequence of getting it wrong runs both ways. Registering when you did not need to imports a whole inspection regime you have no obligation to carry. Not registering when you should is a criminal offence.
Genuinely not sure which side you are on?
This is the single most common question we get from day services, and it is usually answerable in one conversation.
Do I need to register with CQC?What we do
A straight answer first, and the application only if you need one.
The registration question, answered
We look at what your staff actually do rather than what your brochure says, and give you a clear position in writing. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need to register.
If you do need to register
Provider and registered manager applications, statement of purpose and the evidence pack, prepared to the same standard as any other CQC application.
If you do not
What to put in place so the position stays defensible: where the line is, what would cross it, and what to record if a member’s needs change.
Commissioner and funding readiness
Local authority day-service contracts and direct payments each expect different evidence. Worth knowing which you are chasing before you design the offer.
Premises and suitability
Space, accessibility, fire and the practical business of moving people who use wheelchairs through a building. Regulation 15 review.
Safeguarding and staffing
Ratios, training and the safeguarding structure that a commissioner will ask for whether or not CQC does.
Before you commit
Day services are among the cheapest care businesses to start and among the hardest to make pay. Occupancy is weather-dependent, transport eats the margin, and local authority rates for day placements have not moved as fast as staffing costs.
The services that work usually have a second income — a building they also let, a respite offer, or a specialism such as dementia that commands a different rate. It is worth designing that in from the start rather than discovering it in year two.
Fees are quoted before any work starts. Nothing on this page is an offer.
Tell us what your staff actually do in a day.
That is genuinely all we need to tell you whether you are looking at a registration or not. Thirty minutes, no charge. If the answer is that you do not need us, you will get that too.
Text or WhatsApp
07426 919823If it is easier to write it down than say it out loud, send a message.
Get the scope right and the rest follows.