Foreword

This standard originates from a deliberate policy choice made in Georgia in 2014: to advocate for international healthcare accreditation rather than attempt to replace it. Working through the Public Health Institute of Georgia (PHIG, established 2011), its founders organized the country's first structured accreditation initiative — including expert missions by Joint Commission International — and carried this advocacy directly to Georgia's Ministry of Health over the following years.

That advocacy produced, in 2018, the first draft of a Georgian-adapted accreditation standard, and in 2020, the formal establishment of Accréditation Sans Frontières (ASF) as an international legal entity in Paris, alongside the ASF International Standards Council — the standing body responsible for developing and revising ASF's standards. The Council's methodology is directly informed by the World Health Organization's guideline development process, including WHO's use of the GRADE framework for weighing evidence certainty, adapted to the practical work of accreditation. ASF's founder has served since 2016 as a founding member of the UN Secretary-General's Independent Accountability Panel for Every Woman, Every Child, Every Adolescent, and ASF has been a member of the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) since 2023.

This advocacy also found regulatory validation in Georgian government policy requiring independent international accreditation of hospitals, formally implemented through Order №4/ნ (26 January 2023).

Consistent with the structure recognized across major international standards bodies, ASF's work spans four pillars: accreditation of organizations against its published standards, accreditation of the standards themselves through the International Standards Council's ongoing review, accreditation of the surveyors who conduct ASF's own assessments, and accreditation of the training that equips facilities and professionals to meet them, delivered through GMJ Academy. This standard has been developed and refined through consultation with practitioners across multiple continents, and every edition includes a Health & Migration endorsement grounded in WHO's Global Competency Standards for health workers serving refugees and migrants — a commitment ASF treats as non-negotiable. Consistent with ASF's founding principle of accreditation without borders, this standard is published in full and made freely available to any organization seeking to build accreditation capacity in its own country.

This, the third edition, is published in 2026. The ASF International Standards Council reviews and revises each standard on a three-year cycle.

About This Document

This is the ASF Home Care complete standard — seven mandatory base standards covering the full client journey through any in-home care arrangement, from a single independent caregiver to a multi-caregiver home care agency, plus one built endorsement layering onto that base: Health & Migration. No endorsement is ever issued alone — it is only assessed after the base standard is genuinely met in full.

Every criterion follows the same two-page structure established across ASF's standards: an assessment page (a facility self-assessment table, and exactly what an ASF assessor will independently check) and a guidance page (why the standard exists, what good and failure look like, how to implement from zero).

Every criterion carries at least one reference. Numbered references are formal, individually verified Vancouver-style citations; where a criterion instead reflects genuine professional consensus without one attributable paper, that is stated honestly rather than assigned an invented citation.

Immediately after this page is the Facility Classification chapter — the same four-type model already established for ASF's Hospital standard, adapted for home care providers specifically: Crisis, Transitional, Small, or Standard.

Alignment With ISO 9001:2015

This standard's governance structure — Standard 7 — is deliberately built to reflect the core management principles of ISO 9001:2015, the international quality management system standard [7]. This is a statement of structural alignment, not a claim of certification: ISO 9001:2015 compliance is a formal status determined only through accredited external audit, which this document does not confer. The table below shows the mapping honestly, clause by clause.

Chapters