For years, the National Quality Indicator Program has been a residential aged care obligation. Home care providers watched from the sidelines — aware that something similar was coming their way eventually, but without a clear timeline or much detail to act on.
That is changing.
Quality indicators for home care are now firmly on the government’s agenda, and the direction of travel is clear. Providers who wait until the formal requirements land before thinking about measurement will find themselves scrambling. Providers who start building the right habits now will find the transition considerably less painful. This is what we know, what is coming, and what you can do about it today.
Why quality indicators are coming to home care
The introduction of the new Aged Care Act in November 2025 fundamentally shifted how the government thinks about quality and accountability in aged care. The old framework was built around residential care. The new one is built around people, wherever they receive care.
Home care is now a much larger and more visible part of the system. The Support at Home program, which replaced the previous Home Care Packages model, brought home care into the same regulatory conversation as residential care in a way it never quite was before. Consumer experience, quality of life, and safety are no longer residential-only concerns.
The logical next step and one the Department has signalled clearly is that home care providers will be required to collect and report on quality indicators, just as residential providers do now. The specific indicators, timelines, and submission requirements are still being finalised, but the direction is set.
What the residential QI program tells us about what’s coming
The residential QI program started with three indicators in 2019 and now covers fourteen, including staffing, quality of life, consumer experience, pressure injuries, falls, physical restraint, and unplanned weight loss. It expanded progressively as the infrastructure to support it matured.
Home care will almost certainly follow a similar path — starting with a manageable set of indicators and expanding over time. The indicators confirmed for home care so far include consumer experience and quality of life, which aligns directly with what Carepage already measures for home care clients.
That is not a coincidence. The five home care quality indicators covering consumer experience and quality of life were confirmed by the government following a consultation process that drew heavily on feedback from the sector. Providers who have already been measuring these things will have a significant head start when reporting becomes mandatory.
What home care quality indicators are likely to cover
Based on the residential program, the support at home reform framework, and the government’s stated priorities, home care quality indicators will most likely focus on the following areas.
Consumer experience is the most clearly confirmed area. This covers how clients experience the services they receive whether staff are respectful, whether they feel listened to, whether services are delivered when and how they were agreed. This is not a clinical measure. It is about the relationship between the provider and the person receiving care.
Quality of life sits alongside consumer experience as the other confirmed indicator area. This is about whether clients feel their care is helping them live the life they want maintaining independence, staying connected, feeling safe in their own home.
Safety-related indicators are likely to follow. In residential care, these include falls, pressure injuries, and unplanned weight loss. The home care equivalents will look different operationally but the underlying intent, identifying preventable harm, is the same.
Workforce indicators are a reasonable expectation over time, given the government’s focus on staffing levels and qualifications across the entire sector.
The data collection challenge in home care
Collecting quality indicator data in residential care is administratively complex. Collecting it in home care is a different kind of challenge altogether.
In residential care, staff and residents are in the same building. A lifestyle officer can conduct a quality of life survey face to face. A clinical nurse can assess a resident for pressure injuries as part of a routine check. The infrastructure for data collection, while imperfect, is physically concentrated.
In home care, your clients are dispersed across dozens or hundreds of individual homes. Your staff are mobile. Services are delivered at different times by different workers. There is no single physical location where data naturally flows.
This means that home care providers who rely on manual data collection — paper surveys, phone calls, ad-hoc conversations will find quality indicator requirements genuinely burdensome. The only sustainable approach is one where data collection is embedded in the normal workflow of service delivery, not bolted on as a separate administrative task.
Automating survey collection is something residential providers have already had to grapple with, and the lessons from that experience apply directly to home care. The providers who got on top of it early, by using purpose-built tools rather than spreadsheets and manual processes, are the ones who now find quarterly submissions manageable rather than a crisis.
What you can do right now
Waiting for the formal requirements to be published before acting is a reasonable instinct. It is also the one that will cause the most stress when the deadline arrives.Here is what home care providers can do today to get ahead of this.
Start measuring consumer experience and quality of life now. These are the confirmed indicator areas. Whether or not they are yet mandatory for your service, collecting this data gives you a baseline, helps you understand what is actually happening for your clients, and means you will have historical data when reporting becomes required.
Audit your current data collection processes. How are you currently capturing client feedback? Is it systematic or ad-hoc? Is it happening at regular intervals or only when something goes wrong? The answer to those questions tells you how much infrastructure you need to build.
Think about who owns this. In residential care, quality indicator reporting typically sits with a quality manager. In home care, ownership is often less clear. Deciding now who is responsible for data collection, quality, and submission means you are not trying to figure that out at the same time as learning a new compliance requirement.
Look at your technology. If your current systems cannot automate survey delivery to clients in their homes, track response rates, aggregate data, and produce submission-ready reports, they will not be fit for purpose when the QI program arrives. The time to evaluate alternatives is before the requirement lands, not after.
How Carepage supports home care quality indicators
Carepage is built for the full care sector: residential, home care, and retirement living. The platform already supports consumer experience and quality of life measurement for home care clients, with automated survey delivery, response tracking, and reporting tools designed specifically for the aged care context.
For home care providers who want to get ahead of the quality indicator requirements, Carepage offers a practical starting point – lot a theoretical one. The surveys are already aligned to the indicators the government has confirmed. The reporting is already designed around what commissioners and accreditors want to see.
If you want to understand what measuring quality indicators would actually look like for your home care service, book a demo and we can walk through it with your specific setup in mind.
Book a demo to see how Carepage supports home care quality measurement.
