Support at Home Audit Readiness Checklist

The Support at Home Provider Audit Readiness Checklist Your Team Can Finish This Week

A free self-assessment checklist that turns Support at Home obligations into rows you answer Y or N, with a column for exactly where the evidence sits.

Key Takeaways

Support at Home commenced on 1 November 2025 under the Aged Care Act 2024, so the first audits are testing obligations that did not exist under Home Care Packages.
Registration is checked before care quality: delivering a service outside the categories and service types you hold is a breach even when the care was good.
Service agreements must be written and agreed before services begin, and must cover what services, who provides them, both parties' responsibilities, and cost.
Care plans are built collaboratively by the care partner with the participant and must be formally reviewed at least annually, so review currency is a reportable number.
The checklist leaves you with a dated gap action log, which is stronger evidence of working governance than a page of all-Y answers nobody can support.

Why capable Support at Home providers still lose marks on audit day

Most providers who struggle in an audit are not delivering poor care. They cannot produce, on request, the record that proves good care happened. Support at Home sharpened that problem because the program moved several obligations from practice into documentation. Quarterly budgets have to reconcile. Carryover has a defined limit. Prices have to be published in two places and match. Each is easy to do and easy to leave half done.

The single provider model raises the stakes. Every participant is linked to one registered provider that holds the service agreement and coordinates, delivers and claims for all services. When an associated provider or a self-managing participant does part of the work, accountability for the regulatory obligations still sits with you, and an auditor will ask for the governance record of a service your own staff never touched.

A self-assessment closes that distance before the Commission does. The value is not the score. It is finding the three rows you cannot evidence while there is still time to fix them.

What This Template Includes

A document control table and a Document Control sign-off block, matching the house format your other policies already use.
Purpose and scope written for Support at Home caseloads, with Commonwealth Home Support Programme services kept separate.
A How to Use This Checklist section covering sampling, who answers which rows, and the rule for when Y is honest.
Definitions for care partner, single provider model, quarterly budget, carryover, the care management account and the short-term pathways.
Nine checklist tables, each with Item, Evidence / Document location and Complete (Y/N) columns, covering registration categories held, service agreements, care plans and review currency, quarterly budget governance, contributions and pricing publication, short-term pathways, associated providers and third-party workers, incident management and SIRS, and evidence location.
An audit day readiness table plus a Gap Action Log for every row scored N.
Relevant Legislation and Standards, related policies, and a monitoring and review schedule with bracketed placeholders you set yourself.

Who Should Use This

Quality and compliance managers preparing for an ACQSC audit or an unannounced visit.
Chief executives and boards who need a defensible view of Support at Home compliance.
Care partner team leaders responsible for care plan currency and participant consent.
Finance and claims staff handling quarterly budgets, contributions and published pricing.
Providers that have recently varied their registration categories or taken on a short-term pathway.

Related Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should we complete this checklist?

Run it in full at least twice a year, and re-run any section that scored an N once the fix is in place. Complete it again within a few weeks of any change to the registration categories or service types you hold, because that is the section with the least tolerance for being out of date.

Does this replace our Quality Standards self-assessment?

No. The strengthened Quality Standards self-assessment stays as it is. This checklist sits alongside it and tests the Support at Home program obligations specifically, including quarterly budgets, carryover, contributions and pricing publication, which a Standards self-assessment does not reach in that detail.

What counts as acceptable evidence in the middle column?

A dated record in a named system or file that a reviewer can open the same business day without the author's help. Write the system name, report name or file path. If the evidence would have to be assembled first, the honest answer for that row is N.

How do we handle participants who self-manage?

Complete every row for them as well. A self-managing participant may choose to manage their own services, budget and workers based on their approved support plan, but they still partner with a provider for support and oversight, and accountability for regulatory obligations stays with the registered provider.

Can we hand the completed checklist to an auditor?

Many providers do, together with the gap action log. Showing that you found an issue, named an owner and set a target date demonstrates a governance cycle that works. Handing over a checklist of unsupported Y answers achieves the opposite.

Fill in the evidence column before someone else asks for it

Download the checklist, put your organisation name and document number in the control table, and assign the nine sections to the roles that actually hold the records. Set a date for the answers to come back, then work the Gap Action Log the way you would work any other risk register. The first pass usually takes a few hours spread across a team, and it will tell you more about your Support at Home readiness than any single report.