What Should a Home Care Plan Include? A Section-by-Section Checklist

When "the plan" is a stack of Word documents

Ask a home care coordinator where "the care plan" lives, and the honest answer is often: several places at once. There's the intake paperwork from three months ago, a revision the case manager emailed as an attachment, a sticky note about a new fall risk, and a folder on a shared drive with files named ClientName_Plan_v3_FINAL_2.docx. When a family member calls asking what the plan says about weekend coverage, or a licensing surveyor asks what the plan documented before a fall, nobody can point to one current, dated answer — because there isn't one.

That gap usually isn't a training problem. It's a template problem. Most agencies and independent practitioners never sat down and defined, section by section, what actually belongs in a care plan versus what belongs in a separate assessment, a scheduling note, or a family email. Without that structure, plans drift into whatever the last person had time to type.

This checklist walks through the sections a home care plan needs to actually function as a plan — assessment, goals, tasks, safety, medications, and the version history that ties it all to a specific date — so you can check what you have against what you're missing.

Client Information and Emergency Contacts

Every plan starts with identifying and contact information, but "client info" is easy to under-build. A complete section should include the client's name, address, and preferred contact method; the primary family contact and their relationship; secondary contacts in order of priority; the client's physician and any specialists relevant to their care; pharmacy information; and — critically — an emergency contact tree that a caregiver who has never met the family can actually use at 2 a.m.

This section should be separable from the rest of the plan in practice, because it's the one piece caregivers, substitute staff, and family members all need fast, without paging through goals and task lists to find it. A dedicated emergency information sheet that pulls from the same source as the full plan — rather than a second document someone has to remember to update — is one of the more common structural fixes agencies make once they notice how often this section gets checked in an actual emergency.

Functional Assessment: ADLs and IADLs

Before a plan can set goals or assign tasks, it needs a documented, dated picture of what the client can and can't do independently. This is where two long-standing, public-domain frameworks do most of the work.

The Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living, published in 1963, scores six basic functions: bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, continence, and feeding. Each function is typically scored on independence, and the aggregate is interpreted on a simple scale — a score of 6 indicates full function, 4 indicates moderate impairment, and 2 or below indicates severe impairment, per the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing. The instrument is reproducible for not-for-profit educational use with attribution to the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing at NYU, which is part of why it shows up so widely in home care documentation.

The Lawton-Brody Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) Scale, published in 1969, covers eight more complex domains: using the telephone, shopping, food preparation, housekeeping, laundry, transportation, managing medications, and handling finances. IADL scores run 0 to 8, with 0 indicating full dependence and 8 indicating full independence, according to the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing. The term "activities of daily living" itself dates back to Sidney Katz's original 1950s work — it's worth knowing the phrase has a specific, citable origin rather than being a generic industry term.

A care plan without a dated ADL/IADL score isn't wrong, exactly — it's just unverifiable. Anyone can write "needs help with bathing." Almost nobody can prove, six months later, what "needs help" meant on the day it was written.

What should a home care plan include from this section, specifically: the six Katz functions and the eight Lawton-Brody domains, each scored individually rather than summarized in prose, with the date and the name of whoever completed the assessment attached to the score.

Home Safety Assessment

A home care plan that documents function but not environment is missing half the risk picture. A home safety section should assess fall hazards (loose rugs, poor lighting, stairs without rails), wandering risk for clients with cognitive impairment, bathroom safety (grab bars, tub transfers), and general hazard flags specific to the home — space heaters, pets underfoot, cluttered exits.

This section earns its place for a concrete reason: falls are the leading cause of injury for adults 65 and older, with roughly 1 in 4 people in that age group falling each year, according to the CDC. A single fall roughly doubles the risk of a future one. A safety assessment that's actually scored and dated — rather than a one-time checkbox from the initial visit — gives the plan a record of what hazards were identified and when, which matters both for caregiver safety instructions and for answering questions after an incident.

Medication Reminders — Organization, Not Administration

Most home care plans need a medication section, and this is the section most likely to get scope wrong in either direction. A private-pay home care plan is not a clinical medication administration record. It should not attempt to document dosing decisions, administration times signed off by a nurse, or anything resembling an eMAR.

What belongs here instead: a reminder-and-organization list — medication names, the times a caregiver should prompt the client to take them, and pharmacy or physician contact information for questions. This section exists to help a non-medical caregiver keep a client on schedule and know who to call, not to serve as a clinical record. If your plan template blurs that line, it's worth explicitly re-labeling the section so caregivers and families understand the boundary — and so the plan doesn't imply a level of clinical oversight the agency isn't providing.

Goals, Care Tasks, and Review Cadence

This is the section families and caregivers actually read day to day. It should state the client's stated goals and preferences (staying in their own bedroom, keeping a specific routine, preserving independence in a particular activity), translate those goals into specific caregiver tasks (not "assist with hygiene" but what that assistance actually looks like for this client), and note any preferences that affect how tasks are done — a client who prefers a shower to a bath, or a specific time of day for meals.

Attached to goals and tasks should be a review cadence: a date, or a recurring interval (30, 60, 90, or 180 days is common, though the right interval depends on the client's stability), by which the plan gets reassessed rather than left to drift. A plan without a review date is a plan that's implicitly assumed to be permanent — and functional status for older adults rarely stays static for long. This is also where a dated, versioned record earns its keep: when a plan changes, the prior version should stay retrievable, not overwritten, so anyone asking "what did the plan say in March" has an actual answer.

What Should a Home Care Plan Include, Section by Section

Pulled together, a complete home care plan should contain:

• Client information and emergency contacts — name, address, family and physician contacts, pharmacy, and an emergency contact tree
• Functional assessment — Katz ADL scores across all six functions, Lawton-Brody IADL scores across all eight domains, dated and attributed
• Home safety assessment — fall, wandering, and hazard flags specific to the home, scored and dated
• Medication reminders — names, prompt times, and pharmacy/physician contacts, clearly scoped as organizational rather than clinical
• Goals and preferences — what the client wants, in their own terms where possible
• Care tasks — specific caregiver instructions tied to those goals
• Review cadence and version history — a next-review date and a record of what the plan said before it changed

If you're building this from scratch, our complete guide to home care plans walks through the reasoning behind each section in more depth, and our care plan template built for home care agencies and plan of care template give you a starting structure rather than a blank page. For the assessment sections specifically, our ADL/IADL assessment guide and home safety assessment checklist go section by section on scoring. And because the emergency contacts section gets used under the worst circumstances, it's worth reviewing separately — our emergency information sheet guide covers what that page needs to work when someone unfamiliar with the client has to use it fast.

If you'd rather start from a built structure than assemble one section at a time, the Home Care Plan Toolkit bundles these sections — assessment, safety, medication, goals, and emergency information — into a single template.

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