LET'S TALK "THE REGULATOR"

I'm Amrit Dhaliwal, the CEO and founder of Walfinch. Walfinch is a home care brand that focuses on an active lifestyle. The one of the only kind that champions an active lifestyle in later years. Today I'm here to talk about how to start a home care business. And one of the key things to think about is the regulator. Good old Regulator. So what do we need to know? Where are you in the UK?

Depending on where you are in the UK, there will be different regulators. Today, let's focus on England and the Care Quality Commission, the CQC. So in England we have the cqc. How do you get registered and start trading with homecare in England? The first thing to think about is we need a limited company set up post. Limited company getting set up. You'll need a financial viability from an accountant. Then you'll need to find a registered manager. Registered manager will either be someone that has a Diploma Level 5 in Health and social care, is super experienced or is a registered nurse. Invariably, one of these three people will be able to get signed off.

My personal preference is someone with the qualification and someone super experience, because home care, quite specifically is quite nuanced with rotors and all of the logistics around it. So I quite like people that have been in it and really get it and have leadership qualities.

I also find statistically, those businesses take off faster and run at a much higher rate. If you've got great people starting with you from the get go, then what do we do next? We get a police check done, a DBS check on both yourself, the provider and the registered manager. They're done in very specific places, in certain post offices and so on. But we can go through the online applications and you'll be able to see where the CQC DBS can be taken.

Once you've got the CQC DBS done, you will find an application form online with the CQC and you will submit this application form. There's lots of fun essay questions in there. There's things around compliance, there's things around regulation, your finances, business planning and so on. Once that's been submitted, 12 to 26 weeks later, CQC will come out and inspect you, or rather have a registration meeting with you.

In this meeting from the provider, they want to understand, well, are you going to support the registered manager? Do you have the finances and the business now to kind of keep this sustainably going? And are you going to keep on operating from the manager? They want to understand that they understand the compliance, the regulation and can lead a business like this from the front. There's a whole interview process that will happen there and that will happen either on Zoom, a phone call or in person.

Finally, once that's done, you'll get the nice big tick from the CQC to say that you can trade and then at regular intervals, they'll come out and inspect you for a public facing inspection. And in a very quick snapshot, that's how you go through your CQC registration.

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