All You Need To Know About Residential Services For People With Disabilities

The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) regulate and monitor the residential services for people with disabilities. All the organizations that are running residential services, including respite services offered by the Health service executive (HSE) or any other body being funded by HSE is required to adhere to certain mandatory standards.

The Regulations

The National Standards for Residential Services for Children and Adults with Disabilities are the benchmark standards that are needed to be fulfilled by all the residential services. There is already a mandatory requirement for registering a supported living service with HIQA prior to the commencement of the operations. The compliance to standard related regulation is monitored and inspected by HIQA.

The Standards

The National Standards for Residential Services for Children and Adults with Disabilities are grouped under 8 key themes

• Individualised Supports & Care

• Effective Services

• Safe Services

• Health & Development

• Use of Information

• Use of Resources

• Responsive Workforce

• Leadership, Governance & Management

The First four themes represent service aspect of the operations and last four themes cover the organisational aspect of the service providers operation.

The regulatory working

• A service provider needs to show its capability to meet the standards and any legal requirement to get a registration certificate to operate.

• The registration certificate needs to be renewed in every 3 years.

• The service provider will be inspected regularly to check whether all the services are of high quality and meets the regulatory requirements.

• The inspections may be planned or a surprise at any time of day or night.

• The inspectors interact with the residents and the staff to understand the ground reality. They also look through the food program and amenities to verify that regulations and standards are being followed.

The Service providers need to be careful in complying with these standards in order to run a successful operation.