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207 policies · 10 sections · last reviewed 12 October 2026
CuraFlow's Care Inspectorate housing support policies are written for housing support services in Scotland that are registered with the Care Inspectorate, not the CQC, and support people in their own tenancies or in shared and supported accommodation. They work to the Health and Social Care Standards, the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007, the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000, PVG scheme membership, SSSC registration and Scottish tenancy law, with a full section on housing, tenancy sustainment and keeping housing and support separate. Each policy downloads as Word or PDF with your organisation's name, registered manager and address filled in. The library is not written for care homes, or for services in England or Wales.
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Every policy in the Care Inspectorate housing support (Scotland) library in Word and PDF, yours to keep, with 90 days' free portal access for staff sign-off.
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How The Organisation writes, approves, reviews and keeps true the statement of aims and objectives required at registration under the Applications Order, following the structure the Care Inspectorate prescribes, and how that statement then governs the staffing of the service, the premises it may use, and the limits of what it offers.
How The Organisation holds and maintains its registration as a housing support service, how it decides what must be told to the Care Inspectorate and by when, who submits a notification when the subject of it is the Registered Manager or the provider, and how an event is analysed when the provider holds a combined housing support and care at home registration.
How The Organisation is governed and held to account: who the provider is in law, what the board decides and what it delegates, how the board knows what is actually happening in the service, and how one board holds two regulatory relationships where the provider is also a registered social landlord answerable to the Scottish Housing Regulator as well as to the Care Inspectorate.
The operational scheme of delegation for The Organisation: who may take which decision, to what limit, how the authority is granted in writing and checked for competence, and how delegation works across dispersed accommodation, overnight and in buildings where one worker is the only person present. Includes what is never delegated, and the prohibition on one person holding both the housing and the support decision for the same individual.
How The Organisation keeps supporting people when something goes wrong in or to the accommodation they live in: evacuation, loss of a building, decant, utility failure, severe weather, staff who cannot reach a building, failure of systems and telecare, and an outbreak or pandemic. Includes what happens to a person's tenancy, rent and belongings when a building is lost, and who is actually responsible for what when the landlord is somebody else.
How The Organisation manages its money honestly and competently: the separate revenue streams of a housing support service and the different audit risk each carries, the controls on spending and payment, the conflict where The Organisation is also the landlord and money moves between the two functions, financial viability and what happens if the service fails, and the probity arrangements that keep the organisation and the people it supports out of harm.
What The Organisation may say about itself in public: accuracy about what the service is registered to do and what the accommodation actually is, the absolute prohibition on implying that somebody's right to occupy depends on taking our support, how photographs and film of people's homes are handled, the conditions under which a testimonial from somebody who depends on us may be used, and what we do when something we have published turns out to be wrong.
How The Organisation works with the landlord, the commissioner, the Health and Social Care Partnership, housing options and homelessness services, the Scottish Housing Regulator where we are a registered social landlord, and the health, justice and protection agencies around a person. Includes the tripartite problem of commissioner, landlord and provider, and a duty map that says who actually holds what.
How The Organisation enters, manages, varies and leaves the agreements it holds: support contracts with commissioners, service level agreements and protocols with landlords, grant agreements, and the schedules that say who holds which duty. Includes the tripartite problem expressed as a contracting problem, the four gaps where nobody holds the duty, and the terms The Organisation will not sign.
How The Organisation meets the organisational duty of candour under Part 2 of the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc. and Care) (Scotland) Act 2016 and the Duty of Candour Procedure (Scotland) Regulations 2018: how we decide whether the duty is engaged, how we obtain the registered health professional opinion the statute requires when we employ no health professionals, how the procedure is followed step by step, how it sits alongside but separate from notification to the Care Inspectorate, and how we are open with people even where the statutory duty is not triggered.
How a worker raises a concern about wrongdoing or risk, including a concern about the landlord or the building, what protection they have, and what The Organisation must do in response.
How The Organisation guards against exploitation of its own workforce and supply chain, and what staff do when they suspect a person we support, or a colleague, is being exploited, including exploitation carried out through a tenancy or supported accommodation, which is the pattern most often seen in Scotland.
How The Organisation prevents bribery and manages conflicts of interest, including the conflict created wherever The Organisation, or a connected person, is also the landlord of somebody it supports.
How The Organisation satisfies itself, continuously, that the provider, its directors and its Registered Manager remain fit, what happens when fitness comes into question, and how fitness is assessed separately for each registration where housing support is combined with care at home.
How policies are written, approved, issued, read, reviewed and withdrawn, so that the policy set describes what the housing support service actually does, and how a policy borrowed from care at home or from England is adapted rather than adopted wholesale.
How The Organisation uses the Health and Social Care Standards in a housing support service: what the five principles mean in somebody's own home, what each headline standard requires, and what headline standard 5 demands of a provider that supplies premises, which is the point at which a housing support service departs sharply from a care at home service.
How The Organisation meets the duty in section 7 of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019 to have suitably qualified and competent people working in the service at all times in appropriate numbers, how the staffing model is reasoned from the aims and objectives as section 7(2)(c) requires, how overnight cover in supported accommodation is decided as a staffing question rather than a rota question, and what happens when the staffing available falls below the level assessed as appropriate.
How The Organisation covers the hours when the office is shut and people are at home: the on-call manager, what they can and cannot authorise at three in the morning, escalation, staff on site overnight, concierge arrangements, lone working through the night, and the handover into and out of the night.
How The Organisation recruits into supported accommodation so that only people fit to work with adults at risk are employed: how we decide whether a post is a regulated role, the fourteen checks, how night, sleepover and concierge posts are treated, what happens when a reference cannot be obtained, and what is issued before anyone starts.
How The Organisation decides which posts in supported accommodation are regulated roles, obtains and maintains PVG scheme membership through Disclosure Scotland, handles disclosure information lawfully, refers harmful behaviour, and carries out right to work checks that give a statutory excuse.
What every worker in this service must be trained in, by role, before when, and how often afterwards. It separates what the law requires from what the Care Inspectorate expects and from what The Organisation has decided for itself, because the three are not the same and a matrix that runs them together cannot be defended. It carries the full matrix for support workers, night support workers, concierges, team leaders and managers, and it sets out the entitlement to time off work towards a qualification that section 8(1)(b) of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019 puts on the face of the statute.
The training every worker in this service holds before working alone, because most of the people who live in supported accommodation are autistic, have a learning disability, or are otherwise neurodivergent. It covers what those words mean and what they do not, communication, sensory needs and the building itself, distress and what makes it worse, reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010, and the things that only come up in supported accommodation. It states the Scottish position accurately, including that there is no Scottish equivalent of the English mandatory programme and that the Bill announced by the Scottish Government was abandoned and is not law.
The idea the whole service is built on: that a person who needs support to live in their own home has the same right as anybody else to decide how they live in it. This policy sets out what independent living means, where the idea came from, what is and is not enforceable in Scots law, how choice and control are handled in practice, and the difference between a service that does things for people and a service that makes a life possible.
What happens between somebody first being mentioned to this service and the day support starts: how enquiries are logged, the routes housing support referrals actually arrive by and the questions we ask each referrer before anything else, how the prospective assessment is carried out and in whose home, the eight groups of things we must know before we can say yes, why the decision to provide support and the decision to allocate accommodation are never one decision, how a refusal is delivered to the person rather than only to the referrer, and what has to happen between yes and the first visit.
How The Organisation recognises, records, reports and responds to harm to an adult at risk under the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007, including the three-point test, the council's duties to inquire and investigate, the protection orders, the undue pressure exception, and the particular problems of harm in shared accommodation and harm caused by another person we support.
How Prevent works in Scotland, what a housing support worker is expected to notice in a person's home and in the building around it, and how a concern that somebody is being drawn into terrorism is reported to Police Scotland and taken to the multi-agency panel that considers it.
How The Organisation meets its duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 as a housing support service: the duty to employees under section 2, the duty to everyone else affected by the undertaking under section 3, which becomes the principal duty where we manage premises that people live in, the duty attaching to premises we control under section 4, how the duty is allocated in each of the three arrangements, the regulation 3 risk assessment, competent advice, and the enforcement split between the Health and Safety Executive and the local authority.
How The Organisation assesses the environment in which it works: not only the flat but the building, the stair, the close, the garden, the external lighting and the route from the street, who holds the risk in each of those places, the difference between a risk inside a person's own tenancy which is theirs to take and a risk in a communal area which is somebody else's to fix, and what a worker does when the answer to who is responsible turns out to be nobody.
How The Organisation meets the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 as a registered housing support service: who the controller is for each purpose, the lawful bases we rely on, how special category and criminal offence data are handled, data protection impact assessments, breach reporting, individual rights and retention, and the separation that has to be worked out and written down where The Organisation is also the landlord and is therefore running two controller functions at once.
The duty of confidence owed to every person The Organisation supports, and how it is held in a building where people live alongside each other: what a worker may and may not say to one resident about another, why confirming something somebody already suspects is still a disclosure, what the building can legitimately be told, how confidentiality works with families, visitors and the landlord, when it is overridden for adult protection, and what happens when it is breached.
How incidents and near misses in housing support are reported, fact-found and learned from, kept distinct from the wellbeing response a worker receives, cross-checked against Care Inspectorate notifications and duty of candour activations, and closed only when somebody has verified the action actually worked. Carries the independent-review methodology A10 relies on for the duty of candour's own review requirement, and is explicit that this service cannot form the duty of candour opinion itself. Covers housing-specific incident categories a domiciliary accident book would miss: landlord failures, overnight cover, shared accommodation disputes and tenancy-threatening events.
How The Organisation receives, routes, investigates and answers complaints, comments and compliments, and how it makes sure that a person living in supported accommodation with a complaint about their support, their building and their landlord at the same time is sent to the right place for each of them rather than to the wrong one for all three.
The framework policy for Section I. How The Organisation accepts healthcare interventions delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker, which registration covers the task, what a valid delegation record contains, our right to decline, what happens when a worker leaves or competence lapses, and how a clinical intervention is carried out in somebody's own tenancy: the building, the other households, storage, the overnight question, emergency access, power failure and the landlord's consent.
How The Organisation supports people fed through a gastrostomy or jejunostomy tube in their own tenancy, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker: the devices, the feed regimen, the procedure step by step, what can go wrong, when to stop and escalate, and the housing support layer of storage, deliveries, the overnight pump, the shared fridge, power failure, waste in a communal bin store and what the other households in the building may be told.
What The Organisation is registered to provide as a housing support service, drawn from the statutory definition and the twenty-one prescribed housing support services, what falls outside that scope, how the boundary is decided in daily practice, and what changes where the service is also registered for care at home.
How The Organisation keeps a person's home separate from the support they receive, so that changing, reducing or ending support never puts the roof over their head at risk, and how the conflict is managed where The Organisation is also the landlord or holds the lease.
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How a new worker is inducted into a housing support service, including the building they will hold and the people whose homes it contains, and how The Organisation makes sure every worker who must register with the SSSC applies in time, achieves registration, and meets the qualification condition attached to it.
How The Organisation uses a probationary period to confirm that a new appointment was the right one: what probation actually tests in supported accommodation, how it runs alongside the building and person layers of induction and the night gate, how reviews and extensions work, and what happens, for the worker and for the people who live in the building, when an appointment does not work out.
How The Organisation writes job descriptions and person specifications for a housing support service, including why the job description is the document that decides whether a post is a regulated role, and model duties for the three roles that are genuinely distinct: housing support worker, night support worker and concierge.
How The Organisation supervises and appraises its workforce so that practice stays safe, reflective and accountable: frequency and format, what every session covers, and how supervision is actually delivered to a worker who is never in the building at the same time as their manager because they work nights, sleepovers or a lone shift.
The conduct expected of everyone who works in supported accommodation, where the risk is over-familiarity rather than distance: friendship, de facto family, favouritism in a shared house, money, gifts, social media and relationships. It also sets out, in detail, what a worker does when a boundary has already slipped.
How The Organisation deals fairly with conduct and performance problems: telling misconduct from capability, investigating properly, the right to be accompanied, the sanctions available, and the disciplinary matters that are specific to supported accommodation, including boundary failures, money handling, falsified night records and unauthorised entry to a person's home.
How a worker raises a concern about how they have been treated, and how The Organisation deals with it fairly: the right to be accompanied under the Employment Relations Act 1999, the five working day postponement right, and the grievances that are specific to supported accommodation, including complaints about rotas and sleepover patterns, the dual landlord and support role, and the difficulty of raising anything confidentially in a small, live-in team.
How The Organisation treats its own workforce fairly under the Equality Act 2010: recruitment, pay, progression, reasonable adjustments to shift and lone working patterns, religious observance on shift, and the equality questions specific to a building-based, overnight workforce, including rota fairness and the limits of a worker's right to decline a task because of their own belief.
How The Organisation prevents and responds to bullying and harassment at work, between colleagues and, distinctively for this sector, from people we support, their families and visitors: the enhanced duty under the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment including by third parties, why this is more acute in a building-based, overnight service than a visiting one, and how the response is built so it protects the worker without punishing the person we support for behaviour connected to their own needs.
How The Organisation keeps one worker safe, and keeps the people they are responsible for safe, when that worker is the only member of staff in a building: what a lone worker may and may not do, check-in arrangements that actually work, what happens when the worker has to leave the building, and how an ambulance crew gets in.
How The Organisation protects the mental and physical health of its workforce: the legal duty to assess and reduce stress, the specific health effects of night working, sleepovers and shift patterns, moral distress from housing failures a worker cannot fix, bereavement when a tenant dies, and the support available, cross-referred to J17 and B12 rather than repeating their treatment of the arrangements themselves.
How The Organisation handles a statutory flexible working request and the full range of statutory leave, from the day one right introduced in 2024 to carer's leave, parental leave, paternity leave, neonatal care leave and time off for dependants, and how a request or a period of leave is actually accommodated against a rota built around overnight cover and sleepovers rather than treated as though it were a nine to five business.
How The Organisation decides whether, and how, staff wear a uniform or identifiable workwear in a building that is somebody's home, how identification without stigma is achieved, and which requirements, principally personal protective equipment for infection control, manual handling and hazardous substances, are never made contingent on what a building decides about dress.
How The Organisation manages a worker leaving, in every form leaving takes: keys, fobs and door entry codes accounted for the same day, PVG and SSSC notifications made and the referral question always asked and recorded, references given accurately and never restricted by a settlement agreement, and the people a leaving worker supported told properly, with continuity planned rather than left to be discovered.
How The Organisation uses agency, bank and subcontracted staff safely: the framework agreement that makes an agency's own PVG and vetting duties as a personnel supplier real rather than assumed, the evidence held before any agency worker sets foot in a building, why an unfamiliar agency worker never holds a lone night shift alone, the registration boundary that separates supplying staff from subcontracting the service itself, and how compliance is actually audited rather than taken on trust.
How The Organisation manages the risk of workers driving for work in housing support: the checks before anyone drives, the insurance position for a worker's own vehicle including the gap most people never discover, what changes when a worker carries a tenant as a passenger or drives a tenant's own car, how journeys to appointments, viewings and moves are planned and paid, and what happens after a collision.
How The Organisation obtains, verifies and maintains SSSC registration for every housing support worker who needs it, under the register restructured to four parts with a new housing support and care at home practitioner level, and how the separate employer duty to refer a worker to the SSSC is decided, recorded and carried out without being confused with the different duty to refer to Disclosure Scotland.
How The Organisation verifies and maintains registration with professional bodies outwith the SSSC, principally the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the Health and Care Professions Council, including revalidation, annual verification on the public register, what happens on the day a registration lapses, and how a worker's professional registration interfaces with the restructured SSSC register and with the registration boundary that governs delegated healthcare interventions in housing support.
How The Organisation looks after the health of its workers in a building and night based housing support service: what may and may not be asked about health before a job offer under section 60 of the Equality Act 2010, occupational health referral, hepatitis B immunisation for exposure prone or sharps-involved tasks, seasonal influenza and COVID-19 vaccination offered and encouraged but never a condition of employment in Scotland, the 48 hour exclusion rule counted without anti-diarrhoeal or anti-emetic medication, skin health surveillance for occupational dermatitis, and how a sick worker is covered when the shift is a sleepover or a waking night rather than a redistributable round.
How a worker in this service gets the qualification their SSSC registration requires, and what The Organisation is obliged to do to help them. It sets out the qualification families and the routes through them for a housing support worker, a supervisor and a manager, how an SVQ actually works, what paid release and study time we provide under section 8(1)(b) of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019, what happens when somebody falls behind, and where the housing content the SVQ does not contain comes from instead. Because the SSSC register is mid-restructure, every period and part name in this policy is a field to be verified at source rather than a number.
How The Organisation establishes that a worker can actually do the work, as distinct from having attended training in it. It sets out what is assessed and against what written standard, how observed practice is carried out in somebody's own home, who may assess and who may not, what a sign-off means and what triggers a reassessment. It carries the three cases that matter most in a housing support service: competence to work a night alone in a building, competence to handle somebody else's money, and competence for a delegated healthcare intervention, which is assessed by the delegating health professional and never by us.
How housing support workers keep learning after induction and mandatory training: post registration training and learning under the restructured SSSC register, reflective practice adapted to work in a tenant's own home, the link to supervision, the time and money The Organisation provides against a night and building based rota, career pathways specific to housing support, and the personal learning record each worker owns and takes with them.
The housing and welfare rights knowledge a housing support worker must actually have: how to read a tenancy agreement, the stages of an eviction and what happens at each, the Scottish benefits system including the payments that have replaced reserved benefits, the homelessness routes, the property standards and who is responsible for them, and the point at which a worker stops and hands over to a specialist adviser. Includes a competence framework and an assessment tool.
How The Organisation assesses need once support has been agreed: the person's own account first and verbatim, the housing dimension carried through every domain rather than confined to a box, the twelve questions that answer whether this tenancy can be sustained and what would make that possible, risk, capacity and communication, the twenty-one prescribed housing support services used as a checklist of what we can actually offer, carers and family and the duties that belong to the local authority under the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016, the interface with the council's own assessment under section 12A of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, and how the assessment becomes the personal plan required within 28 days.
How The Organisation writes, agrees, holds and reviews the personal plan required by regulation 5 of SSI 2011/210: within 28 days of the service starting, reviewed at least once in every six month period, written around what the person wants their life in their own home to look like. In a housing support service the plan carries the housing outcomes inside it, not as an annexe: sustaining the tenancy, managing money, keeping the home, and moving on. It also records which of the three housing arrangements applies and who the landlord is.
How The Organisation assesses and manages risk in accommodation that belongs to the person, not to us. It separates four different risks with four different owners: risk to the person, risk to our workers, risk to other residents in shared accommodation, and risk to the property. It sets out risk enablement, the recorded decision to accept a risk that the person has chosen to live with, who signs that decision off and at what level, and the small number of things we will not accept whatever anybody decides.
How The Organisation obtains, records, revisits and acts on consent to support: what makes consent valid, why consent to support and agreement to a tenancy are separate things that nobody here signs on somebody else's behalf, why support is voluntary and no house rule or scheme condition can make it compulsory, how a person who agrees to some support and declines the rest is recorded and supported, what we ask about information sharing and what we tell people we would share without asking, and what happens the moment somebody changes their mind.
How The Organisation applies the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 in a housing support service: the presumption of capacity, capacity as decision-specific and time-specific, supported decision making, the five principles at section 1 with benefit as the statutory test, the six Parts of the Act and which of them reach a person living in their own tenancy, working with attorneys, guardians and persons authorised under intervention orders, and what to do when a decision has to be made and nobody holds the authority to make it.
There is no Scottish authorisation scheme for depriving an adult of their liberty. The English safeguards regime is not law in Scotland and no Scottish equivalent has been enacted. What exists is Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 with its benefit principle and its Part 6 intervention and guardianship orders, Part 2 powers of attorney, and the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003. This policy sets out what a deprivation of liberty looks like in a person's own tenancy, states honestly that guardianship is an imperfect fit for it, and sets out what The Organisation actually does: identify it, take legal advice, involve the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, make sure a guardian with the relevant welfare powers is in place, reduce the restriction meanwhile, and review it.
How The Organisation makes independent advocacy real for the people it supports: what advocacy is and why a provider can never be somebody's advocate, the right of access under section 259 of the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 and the duty it places on councils and Health Boards rather than on us, individual and collective advocacy, when we must offer it and how an offer is made so that it can actually be accepted, how to find local provision and what to do when there is none, how we work with an advocate who tells us something we do not want to hear, and why a request for advocacy is never treated as a complaint.
How The Organisation finds out how each person communicates, records it so that it travels, and provides information in a form they can actually use. It covers British Sign Language under the British Sign Language (Scotland) Act 2015, interpreting and translation, easy read, the housing and benefits documents that are almost never made accessible, communication in a shared building, what happens in an emergency when somebody cannot hear an alarm, and what we do when communication breaks down.
How The Organisation behaves inside a home that belongs to somebody else, when a worker may be present for a whole shift rather than for half an hour. It covers entering and leaving, the person's right to ask us out of the room, where a worker sits, eats and makes a telephone call, the staff base and the sleepover room, noise by day and by night, how we talk about people in their own hearing, dignity in personal care and the registration question that comes before it, the person's belongings and post, and what happens when privacy collides with risk, with another resident, with the landlord or with a worker's safety.
How The Organisation makes sure the people it supports actually decide things: not only the large decisions but the ordinary daily ones that a service quietly takes over. It covers the right to make a decision other people think is wrong, the difference between a real choice and one with a penalty attached, blanket rules, supported decision making, the limits of an attorney's or a guardian's powers, choice in shared accommodation, and what we do when the commissioner, the rota or the building is the thing standing in the way.
How The Organisation meets its duties under the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998 in a service where the subject matter is somebody's home. It covers the protected characteristics and the forms of discrimination, the anticipatory reasonable adjustment duty in services, the premises provisions in Part 4 of the Equality Act which have no care at home counterpart, adaptations and the landlord, harassment from neighbours, allocation into shared accommodation, which public duties bind us and which do not, the Convention rights that come up in supported living, and what we do when rights collide.
How The Organisation finds out what matters to each person culturally, religiously and spiritually, and supports it in practice rather than in principle. It covers food and the shared kitchen, prayer and the space and time it needs, washing, dress, festivals in a communal lounge, culture that is not religion including Deaf culture and Gypsy and Traveller communities, death and what happens in the first hours, the substance of competing needs between residents in shared accommodation, and what happens when a worker's own belief is engaged.
How The Organisation supports the private lives of the people it works with, in accommodation that belongs to them. It covers overnight guests and the fact that we cannot prevent them, relationships between people living in the same building, consent and capacity under the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009, the limits of a guardian's or an attorney's powers, contraception and sexual health, LGBT+ people including confidentiality and never outing anybody, pregnancy and parenthood, staff boundaries and the criminal provisions behind them, and the point at which what looks like a relationship is in fact exploitation.
How The Organisation supports people with their own medicines in their own homes: the registration question that has to be answered before anything else, the line between reminding, assisting and administering and which registration each of those needs, where medicines are kept in a flat somebody else shares, who holds the key, and how a person's right to manage their own medicines is protected rather than quietly taken away.
How The Organisation handles medicines that are delegated healthcare interventions rather than ordinary medication support: the registration question that comes before the clinical one, the two separate authorities a delegated medicine needs, what each route requires before a first dose, what changes because the person lives in a building with other people in it, and what a worker never does whatever the hour and whoever is asking.
How The Organisation supports people to shop, cook and eat in their own homes: the difference between building somebody's skills and making their dinner, what happens in a kitchen four people share, food safety where several households cook on one cooker, the cost of running an oven on a low income, and how we notice that somebody is not eating without turning their kitchen into our business.
How The Organisation supports people with bladder and bowel problems in their own homes: the registration question that decides what we may do at all, getting a proper assessment rather than a pad, dignity where the bathroom is along a shared corridor, where three months of products go in a small flat, what laundry costs on a prepayment meter, disposal in a communal bin store, and what to do when a landlord starts talking about the smell.
How The Organisation supports people to look after their mouths and to get dental care: the registration question that decides what we may do, getting somebody registered with a dentist when they have moved eleven times in six years, where a toothbrush lives in a shared bathroom, what to do about dentures, dry mouth and dental pain, and why a service that never looks in anybody's mouth will not find the thing that is making them miserable.
How The Organisation helps people keep their skin healthy in their own homes: recognising skin at risk, supporting repositioning and pressure-relieving equipment, the registration line between reminding, assisting and the delegated wound care this policy does not cover, and what changes because the equipment sits in a rented flat and the bathroom may be shared.
How The Organisation helps people avoid falls and responds when one happens: recognising risk, the registration line between reminding, assisting and the clinical response this policy does not cover, what changes because a stair, a close or a garden path belongs to a landlord rather than to us, and the dignity of being found on the floor of a shared building.
How The Organisation supports people to move safely in their own homes: everyday standing, walking and transferring, the registration line between reminding, assisting and the clinical or specialist handling this policy does not cover, and who consents to equipment fitted into a rented property.
How The Organisation handles moving and positioning that has become a clinical matter rather than everyday assistance: the registration question that comes before the technique, who prescribes and assesses a specialist handling plan, what spinal precautions, complex postural management, bariatric handling and handling around clinical equipment each require, what changes because the hoist, the track and the profiling bed are going into somebody else's rented home, and what a worker never does whatever the hour and whoever is asking.
How The Organisation supports people to wash, bathe and groom themselves in their own homes: the registration line between reminding and assisting, what a shared bathroom does to dignity and how we answer it, equipment and landlord consent, and what to do when hygiene becomes a self-neglect, protection or clinical question this policy does not cover on its own.
How The Organisation supports people living with dementia in their own tenancies, in extra care and sheltered housing where dementia is common, and elsewhere: person-centred support rather than a task list, the registration line for personal care, what door entry and building design mean for freedom and safety at once, the deprivation of liberty question in a person's own home, and what a worker never does.
How The Organisation supports people with a mental illness in their own tenancies, what a community-based compulsory treatment order under the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 does and does not require of a housing support provider, the named person, advance statements, independent advocacy under section 259, the role of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, and what happens to the tenancy, the rent and the property when somebody is admitted to hospital.
How The Organisation supports people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, partially sighted or deafblind to hold and run a tenancy on equal terms. Covers communication, the home environment, equipment, fire and door alerting, dual sensory loss, and the boundary between ordinary support and a delegated ear or eye care task.
How The Organisation supports a person with a physical disability, a long-term condition or a rehabilitation goal to live in, adapt and get around from their own tenancy. Covers reablement, mobility equipment, home adaptations, the landlord interface, and the boundary between ordinary support and a delegated clinical task.
How The Organisation supports a person living with an eating disorder in their own tenancy: recognising and escalating physical risk promptly, supporting rather than policing food and mealtimes, working with the clinical treating team and family, and the firm boundary between ordinary housing support and clinical treatment.
How The Organisation supports a person to die well in their own tenancy, where that is what they want: anticipatory care planning, capacity and advocacy, the registration boundary for clinical end of life tasks, practical support for dying at home, bereavement, and what happens to the tenancy and the person's belongings afterwards.
How The Organisation understands and responds to behaviour that distresses the person or the people around them: functional assessment, positive behaviour support planning, trauma-informed practice, de-escalation, what happens during and after an incident for everybody who was present including other residents, the treatment of as-required medicine given to change behaviour as chemical restraint, and the point at which a behaviour stops being a support matter and becomes a question for the landlord.
What counts as a restrictive practice in supported accommodation, the lawful basis each one requires, the difference between a restriction a person has genuinely consented to and one that has been imposed, the Adults with Incapacity route where a person cannot consent, the role of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, and how every restriction is recorded, reviewed and reduced. It deals in detail with the seven restrictions that are actually found in Scottish supported accommodation, most of which are unlawful as operated.
How The Organisation supports a person to build and keep an ordinary, valued place in their own community: employment, volunteering, education, day opportunities, faith and peer connections, digital access, and the practical work of tackling isolation, distinct from the life skills teaching D43 governs.
How The Organisation supports a person through significant transitions, from children's to adult services, between levels of support, and through a hospital admission and discharge, including what happens to the tenancy and the rent while somebody is in hospital.
What The Organisation does when scheduled support does not happen as planned. Housing support is not a visit round: hours may be delivered as a scheduled call at a person's own tenancy, as time-based presence in a supported accommodation setting, or as on-site or on-call cover for a whole building. This policy covers the door and welfare-check procedure when a scheduled contact gets no answer, the escalation ladder, missed, late and shortened support, what counts as what and why the categories matter, and the fact that a missed or late support session may be notifiable to the Care Inspectorate.
How The Organisation works within the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013. Covers the section 1 principles, the four options the local authority must offer, the Framework of Standards, what changes when the person buying the support is our customer rather than the partnership, direct payments and individual service funds, contracts and consumer rights, invoicing detailed enough for the person to account to the partnership, flexibility in how a budget is used, working alongside personal assistants the person employs, and the absolute rule that we never steer anybody towards the option that suits us commercially. This policy governs the funding and support side only. J02 holds the wall between this and the separate question of who the landlord is.
How The Organisation supports people to manage and spend their own money, what a worker may and may not do with it, the controls that apply every time a worker touches a penny that is not theirs, and how the service detects the thing it is least willing to look for, which is a trusted colleague taking money over a long period.
The legal routes by which somebody else may lawfully manage a supported person's money in Scotland, which route to reach for and in what order, what none of them authorise, and how The Organisation governs the arrangement that causes most difficulty, which is acting as appointee for a person living in accommodation it provides.
What happens between the surgery, the pharmacy and the person's own front door. Covers ordering repeats without over-ordering, the order of preference that puts pharmacy delivery ahead of a worker in a car, what is checked at the counter before anything is signed for, the rule that medicines are never left in an unattended vehicle, cold chain items, controlled drugs, handing over into the home, returning medicines to the pharmacy, and the absolute prohibition on this service disposing of anybody's medicines itself.
Assistive technology used well increases a person's independence. Used to save staffing cost, the same equipment becomes a restrictive practice and a privacy question dressed up as a technology question. This policy covers the decision to introduce any assistive technology, telecare or remote monitoring, the consent and capacity route, the specific and serious question of replacing overnight staff presence with monitoring technology, the least restrictive option test that must be applied and recorded before that substitution is made, data protection for equipment that generates a constant stream of personal data, equipment failure and its consequences, and review.
The operational detail of resuscitation decisions in a person's own tenancy, and the registration boundary that sits underneath it. Covers the Scottish integrated adult DNACPR arrangements and how they differ from England, Anticipatory Care Planning as the Scottish term, the Key Information Summary shared from the general practice record to NHS 24, the out of hours service and the Scottish Ambulance Service, why a DNACPR decision is clinical and is never made or interpreted by a housing support worker, the absolute rule that it never means withholding any other support, exactly what a worker does when somebody collapses and when a worker finds somebody who has died, what happens in the hours afterwards, and where this policy stops and J12 takes over the tenancy question. Read with D07, D29, I00 and I24.
How The Organisation supports people who drink, who use drugs, or who live with somebody who does, in their own tenancy. Starts from Housing First non-conditionality: housing is not made conditional on abstinence or treatment, and a blanket no-alcohol or no-drugs house rule applied to a person's own home is not used by this service. Covers what goes in the personal plan, whether and when we buy alcohol for somebody, the interaction between substances and prescribed medicines, alcohol-related brain damage, recognising withdrawal as a medical emergency, overdose and naloxone, illegal drugs and paraphernalia in the home, needles and sharps, worker safety in an intoxicated household, working with alcohol and drug services, and the point at which substance use becomes an adult protection matter under the correct statutory test.
The person-specific fire risk that sits underneath F11's building level framework: a person may smoke, vape and use prescribed oxygen in their own tenancy, and a housing support provider cannot simply ban it. Covers the legal position that a tenancy is not no-smoking premises, what we do instead of forbidding, the fire risk created by emollient creams soaking into clothing and bedding, oxygen in the home, the Scottish interlinked alarm standard in force from February 2022 and the landlord's responsibility for it, home fire safety visits from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, vaping and battery charging, clutter and hoarding, and exactly what a worker does when something is burning. Read with F11, F20 and F22.
How The Organisation teaches the skills a person needs to run their own home and their own life, rather than running it for them, what meaningful activity means when it is not a timetable of outings, and how the service resists the standing incentive an hourly-paid support contract creates to do things for people.
How The Organisation recognises and responds to domestic abuse affecting the people we support and the people who work here, covering the Scottish criminal offence of abusive behaviour towards a partner or ex-partner, the civil and housing remedies available in Scotland, refuge and temporary accommodation, abuse by a co-resident or neighbour, and what a housing support service can actually do when somebody is being abused in their own tenancy.
How The Organisation recognises and responds to human trafficking and exploitation under the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, with particular attention to the pattern seen most often in Scotland, which is exploitation delivered through the accommodation: a person housed by the person exploiting them, who is not free to leave.
What The Organisation does when somebody alleges that a worker has harmed, or may have harmed, a person we support: the five separate Scottish routes and the fact that they run in parallel, the first hour, precautionary measures, how an allegation is handled where the worker sleeps in the building overnight, and what happens when one resident makes an allegation about a worker who supports somebody else.
How The Organisation responds where a person we support is neglecting themselves or has accumulated possessions to a level that affects their safety, their health or their home, holding together four things that pull in different directions: adult protection, fire risk, the tenancy, and the landlord's repairing obligations. It sets out what can be done without the person's agreement, which is very little, and what actually works, which is slow.
How The Organisation recognises, records, reports and responds to financial harm to the people we support, including the two forms that exist only because the person holds a tenancy: rent diversion, where the money that keeps the roof on goes somewhere else, and benefit appropriation, where somebody else takes control of the income at source.
The absolute bars on money, legacies, attorneyships, executries and will witnessing, the narrow threshold for a small non-monetary gift, how a worker declines warmly without wounding the person offering, and the register that lets a provider prove all of it at inspection. Written for a service where a worker is frequently the main relationship a person has all week.
How The Organisation recognises, records and reports concerns about a child, even though it is registered to support adults, because children visit, live with and are cared for by the people we support, and a 16 or 17 year old we support directly is a child for this policy at the same time as being a potential adult at risk under E01.
The Scottish statutory offences of ill treatment and wilful neglect under the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 and the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003: what they look like in housing support, including in shared and supported accommodation, the line between a mistake, poor practice and a crime, why this goes to Police Scotland, and how the six referral duties run alongside a criminal investigation. Read with E01, E05, E13 and J02.
The Scottish law on female genital mutilation, why the mandatory reporting duty that applies to certain professionals in England and Wales does not apply here and why our route is differently structured rather than weaker, how to recognise that a girl may be at risk, how to support a woman who has undergone it in her own tenancy, and the child protection and adult protection routes we use to report. Applies in shared and family accommodation as much as in individual tenancies.
What a housing support worker does at the door when somebody is not at home, built around the fact that a tenant is entitled to go out and not say where, so the trigger for genuine concern has to be a specific departure from what is known about the person rather than absence itself. Covers the timed escalation, how Police Scotland grade and respond to a missing person report, the Herbert Protocol for people with dementia, the overnight and shared-accommodation version of the sequence, and the point at which an unexplained absence becomes a cuckooing or adult protection concern rather than a going-missing one. Read with D08, E13, J17 and J18.
How The Organisation recognises and responds when somebody else takes over, uses or exploits a supported person's home, when exploitation arrives disguised as friendship, and what a service can actually do given that the person has a legal right to have whoever they like in their own home and may not want anybody protected from.
How The Organisation prevents and controls infection in housing support: the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual as the Scottish standard, the ten Standard Infection Control Precautions applied in somebody's own home rather than in a clinical setting, the three additional problems a shared building creates in communal areas, shared bathrooms and shared kitchens, and the central fact that a person in their own tenancy cannot be compelled to isolate, so the work goes into making isolation possible rather than into enforcing it.
The clinical infection prevention and control standard applied whenever a worker carries out a delegated healthcare intervention under I00: Aseptic Non-Touch Technique, key parts and key sites, creating a suitable sterile or clean field at a kitchen table rather than a clinical trolley, hand hygiene and personal protective equipment selection for a specific procedure, the additional precautions needed for an aerosol generating procedure such as suctioning, safe use of sharps under the Health and Safety (Sharp Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013, and respecting a device's single use or single patient use status during the procedure itself. Cross-referred to F04, F05, F06, F07 and F16, which each carry their own subject in full, so that this policy is the one place the whole technique comes together.
How The Organisation applies the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual's standard on hand hygiene: the moments for hand hygiene adapted for support delivered in a person's own home, the technique for handwashing and for alcohol based hand rub, bare below the elbows, product selection and occupational skin health, and the housing-specific problem of facilities that belong to the tenant, a communal building and a workforce that is rarely near a proper basin. It sets out how the standard is audited in a dispersed service where there is no ward to walk.
How The Organisation selects, supplies, maintains and disposes of personal protective equipment under the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992 as amended: gloves, aprons, masks, respiratory protective equipment and eye protection, chosen against an assessment rather than worn as a uniform, always after the higher principles of prevention have been exhausted. It sets out donning and doffing, storage and supply in a dispersed household caseload and in a shared building, the social and dignity dimension of wearing PPE in front of the people who live there, latex allergy, fit testing, and disposal under F07.
How The Organisation prevents and manages sharps injuries under the Health and Safety (Sharp Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013: eliminating unnecessary sharps use, safer sharps devices, the ban on recapping, safe assembly, siting and disposal of sharps containers, and the immediate action and post-exposure route after a needlestick. It sets out in full the problem a care at home policy never has to solve: a sharp discarded in a communal stair, garden or bin store, where the person who used it may not be known to the service, and the people put at risk include children, other residents, contractors and the public.
How The Organisation classifies, segregates, stores and arranges the collection of clinical and healthcare waste under the duty of care in section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Environmental Protection (Duty of Care) (Scotland) Regulations 2014 and the Special Waste Regulations 1996 as amended in Scotland, regulated by SEPA rather than the Environment Agency. It covers whose waste it is in a tenancy, offensive and infectious waste streams, colour coding, transfer notes and special waste consignment notes, sharps container disposal in partnership with F06, medicines waste, and, at the length the problem deserves, the housing support question a care at home policy never meets: a shared bin store used by several tenancies, a council collection contract that was not written with clinical waste in mind, and who is responsible when the store belongs to the landlord.
How The Organisation assesses and controls exposure to substances hazardous to health under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002: the hierarchy of elimination, substitution, control and personal protective equipment, safety data sheets, and the substances this service actually handles, from cleaning products and disinfectants to medicines as a workplace exposure and the gases used in delegated healthcare interventions. It covers spillage and emergency response and, at length, the question a single household care at home visit never raises: how substances are stored safely in a shared house where other residents, some of them at real personal risk from a bottle of bleach in the wrong place, have access to the same rooms.
How The Organisation decides what is reportable under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, who makes the report, and by when: the reportable categories, the gateway test of an accident arising out of or in connection with work, and above all the limb this sector misses, which is the injury to somebody who is not at work, in a building we run, who is taken from the scene to hospital for treatment. It carries a decision tree as a working annex, sets out the accident book and the statutory record, and separates the RIDDOR duty from the Care Inspectorate notification under A02 and the duty of candour under A10, which are three different duties that one event can trigger at once.
How The Organisation meets its duty under the Health and Safety (First-Aid) Regulations 1981 to provide adequate first aid equipment, facilities and trained personnel for its employees, based on a first aid needs assessment covering dispersed tenancies, lone working and remoteness from emergency services; what first aid means for the people we support, who are not employees, and where that boundary sits against the clinical registration framework in I00; and the specific overnight question this library adds, where the only worker on duty may also be the only person available to help if something happens to them.
How The Organisation manages fire risk in the buildings and homes where it provides housing support: which Scottish fire safety law applies and to which premises, who holds the duty in each of the three arrangements, the premises fire risk assessment and the person-centred fire safety risk assessment, personal emergency evacuation plans for people who cannot get themselves out, stay put and simultaneous evacuation, detection, separation and fire doors, the ignition sources that kill people in supported accommodation, and the working relationship with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.
How The Organisation prevents workers slipping, tripping and falling: in a person's own home, where we cannot change the floor and must change the way we work, and in the communal areas of a building, where the defect belongs to a landlord, a factor or the owners collectively, including who grits the path, who changes the bulb on the stair, and what a worker does when the answer to either turns out to be nobody.
How The Organisation meets its duties under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 as amended: who counts as a user in a housing support service, workstation assessment in a scheme office, a dispersed staff base and a coordinator's own home, eye and eyesight tests, breaks and changes of activity, and the newer question the Regulations were not written for, a worker's near-continuous use of a handheld device to record daily notes and delegated healthcare interventions throughout a shift.
How The Organisation identifies and assesses psychosocial hazards and the risk of work-related violence under regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: individual and building-level risk assessment, personal safety plans, prevention measures for the three distinct sources of risk in housing support, the person supported, a third party, or a colleague, and the full workplace violence debrief protocol this policy owns in place of B13. Cross-referred to B13 for the wellbeing and supervision treatment of stress, and to B12 for the lone working safety mechanics, so that neither is repeated here.
How The Organisation manages work equipment and medical devices used across dispersed tenancies and supported accommodation buildings under the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 and the Medical Devices Regulations 2002: whose equipment it actually is, whether it is ours, the NHS board's, a supplier's, the person's own or a landlord's fixture, and what duties attach in each case; thorough examination and maintenance; moving equipment between properties; the landlord's consent needed before anything is installed in a rented home; and what happens to equipment when it fails, when it is recalled, and when a tenancy or an intervention ends.
How The Organisation decontaminates reusable equipment between uses and between people, under the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual (Scotland) and the manufacturer's own instructions for each device: the classification of equipment by infection risk, what a support worker may clean locally and what must go back to the supplier or the NHS for sterilisation, the safe use of chlorine-releasing agents and other decontamination chemicals under COSHH in a domestic kitchen or bathroom rather than a clinical sluice, decontaminating equipment before it moves between properties, shared equipment in supported accommodation, and the training and records that keep the standard consistent across a dispersed service.
How The Organisation recognises and manages an outbreak of infection in supported accommodation: what a shared building changes, who holds the statutory powers under the Public Health etc. (Scotland) Act 2008, the working relationship with the NHS board Health Protection Team and Public Health Scotland, communal areas, shared bathrooms and shared kitchens, and the central problem that a person in their own tenancy cannot be compelled to isolate.
How The Organisation manages the environmental impact of its own operations and premises: what actually binds a housing support provider in law, which is narrower than commissioners and tender documents often assume, including the waste duty of care and the ban on specified single-use plastics; what applies only where The Organisation is itself a landlord; and the genuine good-practice measures on waste, energy, procurement, travel and building management that make up the rest of a credible environmental approach, kept separate from the person's own household fuel poverty work at J15.
How The Organisation prevents scalds and contact burns in the homes of the people it supports: the temperature figures and where each comes from, thermostatic mixing valves and who is responsible for them in a rented property, the tension between scald prevention and legionella control, people who cannot feel or regulate water temperature, hot surfaces, hot drinks and food, and what happens when somebody is scalded.
How The Organisation works with the condition of the buildings the people we support live in: the repairing standard and the tolerable standard, landlord registration and letting agent regulation, HMO licensing, property inspection where we hold a duty, how repairs are reported and chased, and what we do when a landlord will not act.
How The Organisation identifies and controls the risk of legionella and other water safety hazards in the properties it works in: who the duty holder is under each of the three arrangements, risk assessment and the written scheme of control, temperature control, flushing regimes for little used outlets, voids and reletting, thermostatic mixing valves and the tension with scald prevention, and what happens when somebody becomes ill.
How The Organisation manages the gas, electrical, carbon monoxide and appliance safety of the properties it works in: the annual gas safety check and the landlord's duty under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, electrical installation condition reports and appliance testing, carbon monoxide and interlinked fire detection under the tolerable standard, and what we actually do when a tenant will not let anybody in.
How The Organisation manages the security and shared parts of buildings the people we support live in: who holds keys, fobs and codes, how door entry systems are run and repaired, who is responsible for cleaning, lighting and gritting communal areas, the limits of our authority over a tenant's visitors, the data protection position on CCTV in a building where people live, and access to the building out of hours.
How The Organisation creates, holds, retains, transfers and destroys the records a housing support service generates: the retention schedule and the reasons behind each period, the standards a record must meet, and the rule that governs a housing support service in particular, where the same event can be both a support record and a housing record and, where The Organisation is also the landlord, is held once, for the longer of the two retention periods, with a cross-reference rather than a duplicate.
How The Organisation recognises, logs and answers a request from a person for a copy of what is held about them: the one month clock, who may ask on somebody else's behalf, how a request that spans both the support file and the housing file is answered as one response, and the discipline that this policy exists to enforce above everything else, that a record about a shared building almost always contains information about somebody other than its subject, and that information has to be found and weighed before anything is sent.
How The Organisation decides whether to share information about a person we support, with whom, and on what basis: the eight Caldicott principles and their actual status in Scotland, the schedule of what a landlord is and is not told, sharing between our own housing and support functions where we are also the landlord, sharing with the Health and Social Care Partnership, the council's adult protection and homelessness teams, Police Scotland and other residents, the absolute adult protection override, and the four-line record kept every time.
What a daily note and a wider support record are for, what belongs in one and what does not, and how a record is written about a person's own home without becoming institutional in tone, and about a shared building without becoming, without anybody intending it, a record about several other people who never agreed to be in it. G03 owns retention and the two-file split; this policy owns the content and the craft of the record itself.
How The Organisation secures the systems a housing support service actually depends on: the care planning and rostering application, telecare and monitoring arrangements that carry part of the overnight staffing model, the devices workers carry into other people's homes, and the network inside a shared building that residents also use. Data protection and the Computer Misuse Act apply here exactly as everywhere else in the United Kingdom; what is different is the setting, and this policy is written for that setting rather than for an office.
How a worker's own phone, personal social media account and personal devices are used around the job, and, distinctly, how The Organisation respects a person's own right to their own phone, their own internet access and their own social media presence in their own home, which this service does not own, monitor or restrict except on the narrow, recorded grounds set out in this policy. G07 owns device security configuration and G09 owns photography specifically; this policy owns everything else about a phone, a post, and a screen.
When a photograph or short video may be taken at all: a clinical or wound image for the care record, an incident or property photograph, a promotional image with genuine consent, or a personal photograph taken casually, and the very different consent, storage and retention rules that apply to each. Set in a shared building, where almost any photograph taken in a communal area risks capturing somebody who never agreed to be in it. G10 owns continuous CCTV and monitoring; this policy owns the single deliberate photograph.
How The Organisation decides whether any camera, microphone or monitoring device may operate in or around a building where the people we support live: the necessity and proportionality test for communal CCTV, door entry cameras, why we do not use body worn cameras, a person's right to their own camera in their own home and what that means for our staff, the far harder question of a device used in place of overnight staffing, why covert surveillance is essentially never available to us, signage, retention, and how a request for footage is handled.
The correct, and narrow, position on whether The Organisation is subject to the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002: not, as a general rule, at all, because a private or third sector housing support provider is not a Scottish public authority under section 3 and schedule 1. The two genuine exceptions are set out in full: designation by order under section 5 for a registered social landlord's management of Scottish secure and short Scottish secure tenancies, under SSI 2019/143, and a contractual duty to assist a commissioning public authority with its own freedom of information obligations. Where either applies, this policy sets out how a request is actually handled.
How The Organisation checks that what this library says happens is what actually happens, in a service delivered in thirty separate homes by one worker at a time, much of it overnight, where nobody can see the service by walking through it.
How The Organisation judges how good it is, using the Care Inspectorate's quality framework as the self-evaluation tool it was written to be, and how that judgement turns into a single improvement plan with owners, dates and evidence rather than a document produced for an inspection.
How The Organisation finds out what the people it supports actually think, how it involves them in decisions rather than telling them about decisions, how it handles the collective questions that arise when people share a building, and what tenant participation means for a support provider that is usually not the landlord and occasionally is.
What the Care Inspectorate does, which quality framework applies to a housing support service and to a combined one, how the six point evaluation scale works, what happens before, during and after an unannounced inspection, what a requirement and an area for improvement each mean, how the draft report and the error response form work, what enforcement looks like, and where an appeal actually goes.
How The Organisation supports people using prescribed oxygen in their own tenancy, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker: oxygen as a medicine, the target saturation range, the devices, hypercapnia and why turning the flow up can kill, and the housing support layer of fire in a shared building, cylinder storage, the concentrator's noise, heat and running cost, the landlord's consent, power failure across a whole close, emergency access, and what the other households may and may not be told.
How The Organisation supports people with a tracheostomy or a laryngectomy in their own tenancy, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a specialist registered health professional to a named worker: the tube types, the difference that decides an emergency, humidification, inner tube care, the emergency box and bedhead sign, what to do when a tube blocks or comes out, and the housing support layer of a person who cannot shout, a call system that has to be tested, an ambulance crew that must reach a bedside in under four minutes, power failure, a cold flat, the landlord's consent and what the other households are told.
How The Organisation supports people using non-invasive ventilation in their own tenancy, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a home ventilation, respiratory or sleep service to a named worker: the devices and interfaces, why the mask is the whole treatment, how long this person can safely go without the machine, alarms and emergencies, and the housing support layer of somebody in the building not being somebody with the person, a call system that has to be tested, noise through a party wall, a cold bedroom and condensation, power failure across a whole close, the landlord's consent and emergency access at three in the morning.
How The Organisation supports a person ventilated through a tracheostomy in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a specialist home ventilation service to named workers: the five things that kill people on home ventilation, equipment checks and batteries, the back-up ventilator and the manual resuscitation bag, alarm response, why continuous invasive ventilation in supported accommodation is a two person waking night and not a sleepover, how an ambulance crew gets through a controlled entry door at three in the morning, what happens when the close loses power, where a month of consumables goes in a small flat, clinical waste from a building with a shared bin store, and the limits of a housing support worker's role.
How The Organisation supports a person to use a cough assist machine in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation, as a healthcare intervention delegated in writing by a specialist physiotherapist: the prescription that is never changed, the contraindications and the feed interval, the pre-session safety check, watching the person rather than the machine, where in a small or shared home the session happens and what that means for dignity, the noise through a party wall and why it never shortens a session, infection risk in a building we do not control, the overnight question when a chest infection pushes the routine into the night, power failure and the close, clinical waste from a shared bin store, and the limits of a housing support worker's role.
How The Organisation supports a person who needs their airway suctioned in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation, as a healthcare intervention delegated in writing by a registered health professional: the four numbers that are the whole of the safety, why deep suction is never delegated, the default position on nasopharyngeal suction, the stop triggers, suctioning at the end of life, where in a small or shared home the procedure happens and who hears it, where a week of catheters is stored, where the collection jar is emptied when the bathroom is shared, why a person who needs suctioning at night is a waking night rather than a sleepover, how an ambulance crew gets in when a catheter will not pass, portable suction and power failure, clinical waste from a shared bin store, and what happens when something goes wrong.
How The Organisation supports a person living with a urinary catheter in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation, as a healthcare intervention delegated in writing by a registered health professional: the closed system and why it is opened as rarely as possible, the balloon that is never touched, falling output as a blockage forming, new confusion as a sepsis sign, autonomic dysreflexia in spinal cord injury, and the housing questions a care at home policy never has to answer: what dignity requires when the bathroom is shared, where the bag is emptied and the measuring jug is kept, whether the bedroom door locks and who holds the key, what the building is told, where a month of bags is stored, what a smell in a close does to a tenancy, whether a catheter changes the shape of the night, how a crew gets in at three in the morning, and how used bags leave a shared bin store.
How The Organisation supports a person's bowel care in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation: ordinary bowel support and why it prevents most of the harm, suppositories and enemas under a prescription and a written delegation, digital rectal examination and digital removal of faeces as specialist interventions only, transanal irrigation where a specialist has written the routine, overflow mistaken for diarrhoea, autonomic dysreflexia, and the housing questions that decide whether any of it works: an hour of bathroom occupancy in a house where four people share one toilet, where the routine happens, smell and thin walls, laundry and the shared drying space, what the building is told, where the supplies go, what the state of the bathroom itself does to dignity, and how a large volume of soiled waste leaves a building with shared bins.
How The Organisation handles a request to give a subcutaneous injection to somebody in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation: why the default answer is no, the narrow exception route and the nine conditions, no drawing up and no calculation, site rotation and lipohypertrophy, the sharps discipline, anaphylaxis, and the housing questions that a visiting service never has to answer: where a sharps container sits in a building other people's children walk through, what happens when a needle is found in a close and everybody assumes it is drug related, storing medicines where the fridge is shared, the cold chain when the close loses power, what the neighbours assume about somebody who injects, and where in a small flat an abdomen gets exposed.
How The Organisation supports a person with diabetes in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation: recognising and treating hypoglycaemia, which every worker must be able to do whether or not they hold any delegation; blood glucose testing as a delegated intervention; insulin declined by default with a narrow exception route; never acting on a number; ketoacidosis and hyperosmolar state; sick day rules; feet; and the housing questions a visiting service never has to answer: where the hypo treatment lives when the kitchen is shared, what an overnight hypo does to the shape of the night and why a sensor is not a member of staff, what happens when a person having a hypo in a close is taken for drunk, meal times set by somebody other than the person, and a cold flat and diabetic feet.
How The Organisation supports a person with epilepsy in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation: seizure first aid, which every worker does without any delegation; timing the seizure; status epilepticus and the 999 triggers; rescue medication declined by default with a narrow exception route; the individual protocol and what it must contain; the seizure diary; sudden unexpected death in epilepsy; and the overnight question, which is the sharpest in this section. Section 7 sets out what seizure monitors do and do not detect, how the choice between a monitor and a waking night is actually made, and why a monitor used to avoid staffing a waking night is a restrictive practice and a privacy question before it is a clinical one. Also: other residents who witness seizures, a controlled drug in a building other people live in, communal bathrooms and stairs, power failure, and how a crew reaches somebody at three in the morning.
How The Organisation prevents pressure damage and handles wounds for a person in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation: prevention as core support work needing no delegation, SSKIN, the blanching test, the categories in the words a worker will use, moisture damage as a different thing, wound care declined by default with a narrow exception, the duty of candour question asked every time a pressure ulcer develops, and wound photography. Plus the housing questions: a mattress pump that stops when the close loses power, getting a profiling bed into a second floor flat, the person who sits in one chair for fourteen hours because there is nowhere else to be, where a month of dressings is stored, odour from a wound and what it does to a tenancy, soiled dressings out of a shared bin store, a cold flat and food poverty as healing problems, and whether overnight repositioning makes the night a waking night.
How The Organisation supports a person in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation who has a syringe driver at the end of life. The driver is set up, filled, monitored, re-sited and taken down entirely by the district nursing service, and nothing about it is delegated to our workers under any circumstance. Sets out what a worker checks at every visit, what to do when the pump alarms, when the site looks wrong, recognising pain and distress in somebody who cannot say so, anticipatory medicines in the home, resuscitation decisions and the point of death, and the limits. Plus the housing questions specific to this intervention: what other residents in a shared or supported building are told when somebody is dying and what they must never be told, storage of a lock box and a month of anticipatory stock in a small flat, getting a district nurse or an ambulance to the right door at three in the morning past a controlled close entry, what a power cut does to a battery driven pump and the nurse who is trying to reach the building, landlord consent before anything is fixed to a wall, and the duty of candour route this service cannot operate alone.
How The Organisation supports a person with a spinal cord injury in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation. Autonomic dysreflexia as the emergency every worker must recognise without any delegation, its signs, the order of actions beginning with sitting the person up and checking the catheter, why a blocked catheter is the commonest cause, and when to call 999. Bladder and bowel routines as clinical times, skin in somebody who cannot feel it, transfers and equipment that are never improvised, breathing, temperature and blood pressure, independence and control, recording and the limits. Plus the housing questions: storing a wheelchair, cushions, slings, a hoist and a month of supplies in a small flat, landlord consent and reinstatement before a ceiling track hoist or a wet room is fitted, what a power cut does to a powered wheelchair charger or a profiling bed, why a fixed-hour bowel or catheter routine makes the night a waking night under I00, getting a 999 crew to the bedside fast when minutes matter, and the duty of candour route through A10.
How The Organisation supports a person on home peritoneal dialysis in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation. The renal unit manages the treatment entirely, exit site care is usually the delegated task, exchanges are declined by default with a narrow exception route, and cloudy drained fluid means peritonitis until the renal unit says otherwise, telephoned at any hour. Fluid balance and weight as arithmetic, the room and the hands, automated machines and alarms, recording and the limits. Plus the housing questions specific to this intervention, the sharpest of the six in this batch: storing a month of dialysis fluid, commonly thirty to sixty boxes, in a flat with one cupboard, a dedicated socket and landlord consent for a cycler, why a cycler running overnight has no meaningful battery backup and what a power cut across a close means for a machine mid-cycle, overnight cover, emergency access at three in the morning, and the duty of candour route through A10.
How The Organisation accepts and delivers delegated healthcare interventions involving medicines given by enteral, subcutaneous, rectal, transdermal and buccal routes in a person's own tenancy or in supported accommodation, covering who may delegate each route, route specific competence, step by step procedure, the signs that something is wrong, escalation to the district nursing team, NHS 24 on 111 and 999, equipment, infection prevention, recording and the limits. Plus the housing questions: storing sharps, opioid patches and enteral feed equipment in a small flat, who else in a shared building may be told what when a worker is seen giving an injection or attending a seizure, why a fixed-hour enteral medication round is a waking night under I00 while an unpredictable buccal midazolam protocol is a different question, getting a 999 crew to the door for a seizure or opioid toxicity, and the duty of candour route through A10.
How The Organisation supports a person in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation who needs medicine or clinical care to the eyes, ears or nose, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker: eye drops and ointments, the order and spacing of preparations, punctal occlusion, ear drops and why nothing goes into an ear canal, nasal drops and sprays, eye cleaning and the care of an eye that will not close, the boundary with ordinary medication support under D16, the eye red flags, chemical splash, nosebleeds, clean technique, recording and the limits. Plus the housing questions: why a shared bathroom cabinet is the commonest place a wrong container reaches the wrong person, why a fixed-hour glaucoma regime is a waking night under I00, getting help fast for a chemical splash or a nosebleed that will not stop, the very limited landlord consent question this policy raises, and the duty of candour route through A10.
How The Organisation supports the measurement of vital signs for a person in their own tenancy or in supported accommodation, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker: what each measurement means, how each is taken properly, the National Early Warning Score 2 as it is used across NHS Scotland including the second oxygen saturation scale, the person's own baseline and written escalation triggers, the soft signs that appear before any number moves, what a care worker does and does not do with a score, equipment, recording, and the limits of a care worker's role. Plus the housing questions: the registration boundary, why a fixed-hour monitoring round is a waking night under I00, getting an ambulance crew to the door fast enough for the early warning these observations exist to give to actually matter, the limited storage and power questions this policy raises, and the duty of candour route through A10 after a missed trigger. Read with I20, which is the response.
How every worker in The Organisation recognises that somebody has become unwell and responds: the pattern of deterioration in a person's own tenancy or in supported accommodation, recognising it in people who cannot describe it, the barriers to escalation named one by one, the six step response, who to call and in what order, the time-critical conditions including sepsis, stroke, heart attack, anaphylaxis, hypoglycaemia, airway obstruction, seizures and major bleeding, how to make a 999 call that gets the right response, what to do while waiting, rural and island working, what a DNACPR form does and does not mean, and what happens afterwards. Plus the housing questions: why recognising deterioration needs no delegation and belongs to every worker whatever the registration, the lone night worker in a building with nobody to check their judgement, getting an ambulance crew to the right door fast enough for it to matter, what a worker may ask a neighbour without disclosing anything, and the duty of candour route through A10. The response half of the pair with I19.
How The Organisation supports people with a colostomy, an ileostomy or a urostomy, as a healthcare intervention delegated by a registered health professional to a named worker: the three types and how they differ, what a healthy stoma looks like, emptying and changing appliances, cutting a flange from the person's template, peristomal skin care, output observation and recording, high output and the dehydration and sodium loss that follow it, the signs of a blockage and what to do, the stoma emergencies including a dark or prolapsed stoma, urostomy night drainage and why mucus is normal, supplies, infection prevention, stoma care at the end of life, recording and the limits of a care worker's role. Plus the housing questions: the registration boundary, finding room in a small flat for a genuinely large monthly delivery, why a fixed-hour urostomy night bag routine is a waking night under I00, getting an ambulance crew to the right door for a stoma emergency, and the duty of candour route through A10.
How The Organisation supports the recognition and urgent escalation of suspected sepsis in a person's own tenancy or in supported accommodation: the red flag signs and soft signs a worker is trained to watch for, why the population this service supports, including people with an indwelling catheter, a feeding tube, a tracheostomy, a chronic wound or diabetes, carries a materially higher sepsis risk, why speaking the word sepsis on a 999 call changes the clinical response it triggers, and what a worker does and never does given the registration boundary I00 sets. Plus the housing questions: emergency access fast enough to matter given how quickly sepsis can kill, the overnight and lone worker picture, and the duty of candour route through A10 after a missed or delayed recognition.
How The Organisation recognises and responds to anaphylaxis, a sudden, severe, life-threatening allergic reaction: the signs, the correct positioning while waiting for help, and the administration of an adrenaline auto-injector, which this policy treats as a deliberate, carefully verified exception to I00's ordinary named-worker delegation rule, because regulation 238 of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, with Schedule 19, permits any person to give adrenaline by injection to save a life in an emergency. What that means in practice for a named delegation as the ordinary planned model, for a genuine emergency where no delegation exists, for storing and checking devices, for known triggers and avoidance, and for the building and overnight questions this library adds throughout Section I.
How The Organisation responds when a worker finds a person appears to have died: the unqualified default, attempt resuscitation and call 999 unless a valid, current Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation decision or anticipatory care plan clearly covers this exact situation; the sharp legal and clinical distinction between a worker recognising an absence of signs of life and a doctor or a registered healthcare professional formally verifying or confirming death, which national guidance limits to registered professionals and which a worker in this service never does; what happens next, including who may attend to confirm death, certification and registration of death in Scotland, deaths reportable to the procurator fiscal, and the tenancy, notification and bereavement consequences that follow in a person's own home.
The kinds of agreement under which the people we support hold their homes, what each one gives them, how a worker reads an agreement and records what it says, and the things staff must never do with somebody else's tenancy.
How The Organisation works to keep people in their homes: the warning signs that a tenancy is in trouble, what we do about each one, the actual stages of the eviction process in Scotland for each kind of agreement, and the action required of us at every stage from the first arrears letter to the day after an order is granted.
How The Organisation supports people to understand and pay their rent and service charges, what we do at each stage as arrears build, the difference between eligible and ineligible service charges, and how the conflict is managed where The Organisation is also the landlord. Support is never withdrawn as a sanction for arrears.
How housing costs are met for the people The Organisation supports: why supported accommodation sits outside the Universal Credit housing costs element and continues to be met by Housing Benefit, what specified and exempt accommodation mean, how status is established before anybody moves in, what evidence a claim needs, and what we do when a claim is refused, suspended or fails.
How The Organisation helps the people it supports to claim what they are entitled to across three separate systems: Social Security Scotland, the Department for Work and Pensions and the council. Covers Adult Disability Payment and the other Scottish payments, the Scottish Welfare Fund, Discretionary Housing Payments, Council Tax Reduction, and the boundary between supporting a claim and giving regulated financial or debt advice, which we do not do.
How The Organisation recognises that somebody we support is homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, what the statutory homelessness duties are and who actually holds them, what the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025 ask and act duty requires and of whom, and what we do at every stage even where the duty is not ours.
What Housing First actually requires of a support service, why housing is never conditional on treatment, abstinence or engagement, how harm reduction works in somebody's own tenancy, what open-ended support means for caseloads and rotas, and how rapid rehousing changes the work of a housing support service.
How people reach the service, what we need at referral, how eligibility is decided, why the allocation of accommodation and the decision to provide support are two separate decisions taken and recorded separately, the reasons for which we may legitimately decline, the reasons for which we may not, and how we hold ourselves to not selecting only the people who are easy to support.
What The Organisation does in the twelve weeks after somebody gets the keys: setting the house up so it can be lived in, getting the money and the meters right, registering with a GP and a dentist, writing the personal plan inside the 28 days regulation 5 allows, and reading the early signs that a tenancy is not going to hold while there is still time to do something about it.
How support ends without the tenancy ending, how a planned move-on is done, what a landlord must actually do before treating a property as abandoned, what happens when a tenant dies including succession rights and belongings, and why The Organisation has no authority to clear a property.
How people who did not choose each other live together in shared supported accommodation: what a house agreement can and cannot do, who owns communal space, how conflict between residents is handled, what happens when one person's distress affects neighbours who cannot leave, relationships between residents, and the narrow limits of The Organisation's authority over what an adult does in their own home.
How The Organisation supports a person to get repairs done and adaptations fitted in their own home, without taking the tenancy over: the repairing standard and the tolerable standard, who reports a repair and how we help them do it, the right to repair, the damp and mould timescales, what to do when a landlord will not act, and the assessment, consent and funding routes for adaptations and aids.
How The Organisation supports people to get and keep a safe, affordable energy and water supply in their own home: prepayment meters and self-disconnection, the Priority Services Register, supplier obligations, fuel poverty as a Scottish statutory target, energy debt, the referral routes to Home Energy Scotland and Warmer Homes Scotland, and the line between helping somebody and giving regulated financial advice.
How The Organisation records what belongs to the person, what belongs to the provider and what belongs to the landlord, how contents insurance is offered and explained, what happens to belongings when somebody moves, goes into hospital, abandons a tenancy or dies, and the rule that staff never dispose of anything.
How The Organisation decides what overnight cover a person needs, the difference between a sleepover and a waking night and what each is actually for, the pay and working time position including the effect of Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake, the welfare of the worker who sleeps on the premises, and the point at which a repeatedly disturbed sleepover has become a waking night and must be re-graded.
The tenant's right to exclude anybody from their home including The Organisation, the only circumstances in which a worker may enter and on what authority, how keys, fobs, key safes and door entry codes are held and recorded, what we do when there is no answer and we are worried, and why we have no power to bar a visitor from somebody else's tenancy even when that visitor is doing them harm.