Ireland's Home Support Regulation And The AI Opportunity

For years, Ireland's home support sector has operated without a formal regulatory framework. Anyone could set up as a home support provider without being registered, without meeting national quality standards, and without independent oversight. That has now changed.

The Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, and the Minister of State for Older People and Housing, Kieran O'Donnell, welcomed the Bill, which amends the Health Act 2007 to provide for a registration framework for home support providers, while making it an offence to operate a home support service without registration.

Home support providers will be required to adhere to a registration framework supported by national quality standards developed by HIQA, and meet minimum requirements set out under Ministerial regulations, safeguarding service users, raise the quality and consistency of care nationally, and representing tangible progress in meeting the Programme for Government commitment of a statutory homecare scheme.

The Chief Inspector of Social Services will monitor and assess compliance against Ministerial regulations and HIQA standards. For families relying on home support, that means something simple but profound: confidence. Confidence that the care their loved one receives meets the same standard, wherever and however it is provided.

As Minister O'Donnell put it: ‘I am really pleased as Minister of State for Older People and Housing to have now brought the landmark Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025 through both Houses of the Oireachtas. Under this Bill, for the first time in Ireland, all home support providers will be regulated. Home support is a vital service that is delivered to many people across the country every day by public, private and voluntary providers. It is essential that it is properly regulated nationwide.’

This legislation arrives at a moment when Ireland's home care sector is facing the most significant period of growth and pressure in its history.

The population of Ireland aged 65 years and over is projected to increase from 0.78 million to over 1.3 million between 2022 and 2040, with the overall proportion of the population aged 65 and over projected to increase from 15% to 21%. By 2040, 1 in 5 people in Ireland will be aged 65+, and the population aged 85 years and over, who use a substantial amount of home support, is projected to more than double.

 According to figures provided by the HSE, 25.5 million hours of home support were delivered in 2025, with approximately 79,400 people receiving home support that year. According to figures provided by the HSE, 25.5 million hours of home support were delivered in 2025, with approximately 79,400 people receiving home support that year.

The demand for home support is projected to rise by up to 91%, driven by a doubling of the population aged 80+, the cohort who have the highest need for home care.

And yet, supply is struggling to keep pace.

Research published in 2025 estimates that Ireland will require an additional 7,069 home support workers by mid-2025 to meet rising demand, with the total shortfall increasing to 16,348 workers by 2040. At the end of 2024, 5,556 older people were waiting nationally for home care, with waiting lists five times greater outside of Dublin.

These are real people - older adults, people with disabilities, and their families - waiting for the support they need to live well at home. The HSE National Service Plan 2026 confirms the intention to leverage information technology in home support services to enhance administrative efficiency, and sets a target for home support hours approximately 11% higher than budgeted 2025 levels.

The takeaway here is that the current resources may no longer by enough and that the sector needs smarter tools.

For home support providers, the Bill introduces a new level of accountability, and with it, a new set of operational responsibilities. Against this emerging legislative backdrop, HIQA's draft National Standards for Home Support Services aims to establish a framework for delivering safe, high-quality, and person-centred home support services across Ireland. Released in November 2024, HIQA intends for the draft standards to become regulatory benchmarks.

These changes will shape the future of the sector, influencing how services are delivered and measured. Preparing for compliance is about creating a safer, more reliable environment for service users.

Providers will need to demonstrate compliance, maintain thorough audit trails, manage increasingly complex workforces, and deliver person-centred care, all at the same time, and at growing scale. Non-compliance can lead to significant consequences, including legal and financial penalties, erosion of trust among service users, families and stakeholders, and loss of revenue from service users choosing compliant providers.

The good news is that this is exactly the kind of challenge that technology, and specifically, agentic AI, is built to help with.

You may have heard a lot about artificial intelligence recently. It can feel like a big, abstract concept, something for tech companies and hospitals. Agentic AI is a little different, and closer to your work than you might think.

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can pursue goals with a degree of autonomy, gathering information, reasoning through options, and acting with limited human intervention. Unlike traditional software that waits to be told what to do, agentic AI works proactively alongside your team, spotting issues before they become problems and handling routine tasks so your people can focus on what matters most: the person in front of them.

In a regulated home support environment, that means:

• Compliance monitoring - automatically flagging gaps in documentation, overdue reviews or regulatory risks before an inspection finds them
• Intelligent rostering - matching the right care worker to the right person, accounting for qualifications, continuity of care, travel time and individual preferences
• Smart care planning - building personalised support plans based on best practice, updated in real time as a person's needs change
• Reduced administrative burden - freeing care workers from paperwork so they can spend more time with the people they support

These are practical tools that are available now, and they are already helping providers across Ireland and the UK to deliver better, more consistent care.

One encouraging thing is that Ireland's government is actively investing in the technology that will help it thrive.

The Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD, has launched AI for Care, Ireland's first national strategy dedicated to the safe, responsible, and effective application of artificial intelligence in health and social care. This strategy marks a major milestone in the digital transformation of the Irish care services, signifying strategic intent, operational readiness, and a whole-of-system shift toward safe, ethical, and effective adoption of AI across care.

AI for Care, published on 11 March 2026, sets out how AI will improve care across four key areas: clinical care, operations, research and innovation, and public health. It sets out how AI can modernise care and healthcare services and improve experience through faster diagnoses, better flow, less paperwork, earlier detection of disease, greater efficiency, and consistent care nationwide.

AI is not about replacing the human heart of care, but to provide a clear and practical roadmap for adopting AI in ways that are safe, transparent, and enhance care with the strategy focusing on using technology to strengthen the vital human relationships.

This places strong emphasis on safe, ethical and responsible use, backed by governance, regulation and secure data infrastructure. For home support providers, this is reassuring. 

Ireland's home care sector is at a turning point.

The regulation is here. The demand is growing. The government's own strategy is pointing towards AI as a key part of the solution.

And the technology to support all of this is ready and available.

The introduction of this Bill reflects the Government's recognition of the growing importance of home care services in Ireland. With an ageing population and increasing demand for home-based care, the sector has received significant funding in recent years, and regulation is seen as a necessary step to protect vulnerable service users and ensure that quality standards are maintained.

The providers who will thrive in this new landscape are those who invest now in the digital infrastructure to support quality, consistency and accountability, just the things the Bill demands.

At Access, we have been working with care providers in Ireland for over 30 years. We were proud to bring care leaders together earlier this year at our AI Workshop with HCCI, exploring how technology can support the sector's transformation. Our agentic AI platform, Access Evo, is built specifically for health and social care, combining care planning, compliance tracking, workforce management and real-time insights into one intelligent platform. It is ISO 42001 accredited, meaning our approach to responsible and ethical AI governance meets the highest global standards.

The passage of the Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025 is a landmark moment for Ireland's home care sector, a signal that quality matters, that vulnerable people deserve consistent, regulated care, and that the sector is ready to step up.

Agentic AI is the partner to that ambition supporting the care workforce by handling the complexity, the paperwork and the compliance burden, so that care teams can do what they do best.

The question for every home support provider right now is how quickly you can make artificial intelligence work for you.