What Does a Home Help Do in Ireland? Duties, Limits, and What to Expect

The Core Tasks Home Support Workers Perform

Once your parent is approved for HSE Home Support hours after the interRAI care needs assessment, a home support worker visits at scheduled times to help with the tasks set out in the care plan. The care plan is specific to your parent — not every client gets the same services.

Typical duties include personal care (assistance with washing, showering, dressing, and toileting), light household tasks (preparing meals, making beds, basic tidying), mobility support (helping your parent move safely around the house, including transfers from bed to chair), and companionship during the visit. The care plan may also include support with activities like grocery lists, appointment reminders, and prompting your parent to eat or drink.

Home support workers are not cleaners, and their role is not general housekeeping. If your parent's care plan specifies meal preparation, the carer will prepare a meal — but they will not deep-clean the kitchen, do the weekly shopping, or manage laundry beyond what directly relates to personal care.

The Medication Boundary You Need to Understand

This is where families are most frequently caught off guard. Under Irish health guidelines, non-nursing home support workers can only prompt your parent to take their medication. They cannot dose, measure, or administer medicines. They cannot handle syringe injections, apply clinical skin patches, or organise loose pills from standard bottles.

For a carer to assist even with prompting, the medications must be pre-dispensed by a registered pharmacist into a sealed compliance system — typically a multi-compartment blister pack (a weekly pill organiser filled by the pharmacy). The carer can then remind your parent to take the correct compartment at the right time, and they can open the sealed compartment. But they cannot decide which pills to give or handle any medication that is not in a sealed, pharmacist-prepared system.

If your parent requires clinical medication administration — insulin injections, nebuliser management, or wound dressings — that must be arranged separately through the GP, a Public Health Nurse, or a private nursing service. This is a clinical role, not a home support role.

Manual Handling and the Two-Carer Question

If your parent uses a hoist — mobile, standing, or ceiling track — there are strict health and safety requirements. Under the Health and Safety Authority regulations, all hoisting equipment must be inspected by a competent technician every six months, and carers must be trained in its specific operation.

Many private agencies implement blanket two-carer policies for any hoisting task. Irish and European safety standards, however, say the number of carers required should be determined by a documented risk assessment specific to your parent's situation. If a ceiling track hoist can be safely operated by one trained carer without risk to the worker or client, single-carer hoisting is legally permissible. But agency insurance policies often override this, which means the family is billed for two carers' time at each visit.

If the care plan calls for two carers per visit, that doubles the effective hourly cost for any privately purchased top-up hours. It is worth asking the agency to provide the written risk assessment that justifies the two-carer requirement, and discussing it with the HSE assessor if you believe the blanket policy does not reflect your parent's actual needs.

What Happens When the Care Plan Changes

Care needs evolve. Your parent might stabilise after a hospital discharge and need fewer hours, or they might deteriorate and need more. The HSE conducts semi-annual reviews of the care plan, but you can request an immediate reassessment if there is a significant change — a fall, a new diagnosis, rapid cognitive decline, or the loss of an informal family carer.

Contact the local HSE Home Support Office or ask the Public Health Nurse to initiate a review. A new interRAI assessment determines whether the hour allocation should change. If you disagree with the revised allocation, you have 20 days to submit a written appeal to the local office.

For a complete guide to the HSE Home Support process — including how to prepare for the assessment, choose between traditional and CDHS delivery, and appeal decisions — the Home Support Scheme Ireland guide covers every step with checklists and templates.

See more Ireland guides →