Which Type of Facility Are You?
Which Type of Facility Are You?
Four Facility Types, Not One
The same four-category model built for ASF's Hospital standard applies here, with one deliberate change: Small is anchored to a genuine, real-world unit for home care — a single, independent caregiver. Home care, unlike a hospital or a facility-based residential setting, can be and very often is delivered by exactly one caregiver working directly for a client or family.
Standard (ST)
A fully resourced, functioning home care agency — a full multi-caregiver team, administrative and supervisory structure, no adaptation needed.
Small (SM) — where staffing depth, not crisis or poverty, is the defining constraint
Exactly one independent caregiver is the confirmed anchor. This is not a research threshold requiring external verification — it is the plain, real unit of home care itself: a solo caregiver, otherwise stable, genuinely limited only by being one person doing what a larger agency would otherwise share.
Transitional (TR)
Real national resource or infrastructure limitation, no active conflict — the same World Bank-anchored logic used throughout ASF's standards.
Crisis (CR)
Active conflict or humanitarian emergency — overrides every other consideration, exactly as in the Hospital standard.
The Universal Floor
A small number of criteria apply in full, in every one of the four types, with no exceptions: genuine background verification for anyone entering a client's home unsupervised, real informed consent, dignity and non-discrimination, freedom from abuse and neglect, and a caregiver who is genuinely reachable if something goes wrong — a real, specific requirement given a home caregiver, unlike facility staff, often works entirely alone.
Which Type of Home Care Provider Are You?
Answer these questions in order, top to bottom. The moment you answer YES, stop — that is your answer. If you reach the end still answering NO, you are Standard.
| WORK DOWN THIS LIST. STOP AT YOUR FIRST YES. | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Is your country in an active war, armed conflict, or a declared humanitarian emergency right now? This means fighting, displacement, or a declared emergency is actually happening now — not that things are generally difficult. |
☐ YES → CR CRISIS |
☐ NO → next question |
| 2 | Does your national government struggle badly to fund healthcare, or is national power or medicine supply unreliable — even though there is no war or crisis? This is about your country as a whole, not just your own facility. |
☐ YES → TR TRANSITIONAL |
☐ NO → next question |
| 3 | Are you a single, independent caregiver working directly for a client or family, not employed by a larger agency, and is that the main reason you cannot offer certain services — for example, coverage during your own illness or a second caregiver for overnight care? This applies even in a stable, well-funded country. A genuine solo caregiver, not a small agency team — the limit here is being one person, nothing else. |
☐ YES → SM SMALL |
☐ NO → next question |
| If you answered NO to all three questions above: You are STANDARD (ST) — no crisis, no national constraint, and staffing depth is not holding you back. |
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THIS IS ME
| My type: ☐ CR ☐ TR ☐ SM ☐ ST |
Example: A solo, independent caregiver working in rural Moldova — no active conflict, so NO to question 1. National healthcare funding is genuinely unreliable, so YES to question 2. Stop there. This caregiver is TR.

Home Care Standards — overviewFacility Classification — Which Type of Facility Are You?Standard 1 — Client Rights & Dignity in the Home SettingStandard 2 — Caregiver Screening & Background VerificationStandard 3 — Home Environment Safety AssessmentStandard 4 — Medication Management & Family CoordinationStandard 5 — Caregiver Safety in an Uncontrolled EnvironmentStandard 6 — Care Plan Development & Ongoing SupervisionStandard 7 — Governance & StaffingStandard 8 — Health & MigrationReferences & Index
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