How to Write a Lone Working Policy for a Domiciliary Care Agency

By Kizito Chukwude

Domiciliary care is, by definition, lone working. Your care workers enter service users' homes alone, often at unsociable hours, in areas they may not be familiar with. They work without direct supervision, make decisions independently, and face risks that workers in other settings do not encounter. A lone working policy is not just a CQC requirement. It is a fundamental part of your duty of care to your staff.

This guide covers what your lone working policy must include, the legislation it must reference, and the practical systems you need to keep your workers safe — whether you describe your service as domiciliary care, home care, or community-based care.

The Legal Framework

Your lone working policy must reference:

• Health and Safety at Work Act 1974: places a general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of employees at work.
• Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: requires employers to carry out risk assessments, including for lone working situations.
• HSE guidance INDG73 (revised 2020): the Health and Safety Executive's specific guidance on protecting lone workers. If your lone working policy does not cite INDG73, that is a gap inspectors will identify.
• Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015: requires providers to have regard to the need to protect staff from risk.
• Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007: relevant in extreme cases where a failure in lone working arrangements contributes to a worker's death.

CQC inspects lone working under Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) and Regulation 18 (staffing). Inspectors expect to see a policy that addresses the specific risks your workers face and the systems you have in place to manage those risks.

Risk Assessment Before First Visits

Every service user address should be risk-assessed before a care worker visits alone. This is not a generic risk assessment — it is specific to that address, that service user, and that worker.

Your policy must cover what a pre-visit risk assessment includes:

• Address and access arrangements: how does the worker enter the property — is there a key safe, and are there communal areas to navigate before reaching the front door?
• Known property risks: pets, environmental hazards, stairs, clutter, unsafe wiring, or hoarding.
• Service user behaviour: any history of verbal or physical aggression, known triggers, and de-escalation strategies that have worked previously.
• Third parties who may be present: family members, friends, other visitors — who is and is not authorised to be in the home during a visit.
• Mobile phone signal at the address: if signal is poor or absent, what is the contingency for raising an alarm?
• Emergency exit routes: how would the worker leave quickly if a situation escalated?
• Time and area context: is this an early-morning, late-evening, or night visit, and are there known safety concerns about the area?

The risk assessment must be documented, shared with the care worker before their first visit, and reviewed regularly. It must live in the care plan and be accessible before the worker arrives — not handed over at the door. If a new risk emerges, such as a change in the service user's behaviour or new people moving into the household, the risk assessment must be updated immediately.

Check-In and Check-Out Systems

You must have a system that tracks your care workers' whereabouts. At minimum, workers should check in when they arrive at a visit and check out when they leave. Common options include:

• Electronic monitoring via care management software using GPS or NFC tags to confirm arrival and departure
• Telephone check-in at the start and end of each visit
• A buddy system where workers contact a designated colleague if they have concerns

Whatever system you use, your policy must define exactly what the worker does when they arrive, what they do when they leave, how long can elapse before a missed check-in or check-out triggers a response, and what that response is. Most agencies set the missed check-out trigger at 15 to 30 minutes after the scheduled end of visit. Anything longer leaves a worker potentially unaccounted for. Anything shorter generates too many false alarms.

The escalation procedure must be defined in advance — not improvised in a real emergency. A typical escalation looks like: attempt to contact the worker by phone, contact the service user, dispatch another staff member to the address, contact emergency services. The escalation timescales should be realistic and appropriate to the level of risk. Your policy must specify who is responsible for monitoring at any given time, including out of hours.

What Workers Should Do If They Feel Unsafe

Your policy must give workers clear guidance on what to do if they feel unsafe during a visit. This includes:

• The right to leave any property where they feel at immediate risk — without needing prior authorisation from the office.
• A pre-agreed code word or phrase the worker can use in a phone call to indicate they need assistance without alerting the person they are with. This is one of the most effective tools in domiciliary care lone working — and one of the most commonly missing from policies.
• What to do once they have left: who to contact, what to document, and how the incident is reviewed.
• Calling 999 directly if there is immediate danger.
• An explicit statement that leaving a visit early because of a safety concern will never result in disciplinary action.

The last point is critical. Workers who fear being disciplined for leaving early are workers who stay in unsafe situations. Your policy must make clear, repeatedly, that worker safety comes before completion of a care task — and your training must reinforce that message.

Personal Safety Measures

Your policy should cover the practical measures you put in place to support lone workers day-to-day. These include ensuring workers have charged mobile phones with credit and signal at all times, providing personal safety alarms or panic-button apps where appropriate, supplying an up-to-date list of emergency contacts for every service user, advising workers on safe parking and route planning particularly for evening and night visits, and providing guidance on managing confrontational situations and de-escalation.

What CQC Inspectors Actually Look For

CQC inspects your lone working policy under Safe — specifically around staffing and safe systems. They will not just read the policy. They will ask workers directly: "What do you do if you feel unsafe during a visit?" If a worker cannot answer this question, or if their answer does not match your policy, the inspector knows your policy exists on paper only. The single strongest signal of a real lone-working culture is workers who can describe the system in their own words.

Training

All care workers must receive lone working training as part of their induction and on an ongoing basis. Training should cover the content of your lone working policy, how to use the check-in and check-out system, how to carry out a dynamic risk assessment on arrival at a visit, personal safety techniques, what to do in an emergency, and how to report concerns. For broader training and documentation requirements, see our registered manager documents guide. For a related policy area, see our guide to moving and handling policy.

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