What is a Domiciliary Care Agency?

Domiciliary care agencies provide care to people in their own homes. This care can be both domestic and/or personal.

Domestic care includes shopping, laundry and cleaning. Personal care includes assistance with personal hygiene, continence and dressing.

A domiciliary care agency will often be paid to provide care to service users by local authorities. However, there is a partial move to personal budgets where service users have control over who provides the care. This move is providing increased opportunities, particularly for the smaller care agencies where previously the larger ones have tended to dominate local authority contracts.

But the biggest development of all is that more and more people are now finding that they are turned away by the local authority for funding and need to buy in care themselves. They must also find that care for themselves. This is where new care agencies, not reliant necessarily on local authority funding, can really make an impact if they understand the marketplace.

Most domiciliary care agencies concentrate on providing personal care, with a little domestic support . One option before beginning a full domiciliary care business would be to consider offering the domestic support first and then move towards offering personal care when you have a steady client base. If you are interested in this then there is a franchise business which offers low cost entry into this market place - Diamond Home Support - www.diamondhomesupport.com  You can view details of their franchise package here and request a prospectus here. Current entry level costs are £1,495+vat which represents excellent value for money.