Care Home Code of Practice in Hong Kong: What It Requires

What the care home Code of Practice is, and what it is not

A residential care home for the elderly in Hong Kong is governed by three documents, and they do different jobs. The Residential Care Homes (Elderly Persons) Ordinance (Cap. 459) commenced on 1 April 1995 and came into full implementation on 1 June 1996, regulating the service through a licensing scheme administered by the Director of Social Welfare. The Residential Care Homes (Elderly Persons) Regulation (Cap. 459 sub. leg. A) is made under section 23 of the Ordinance and stipulates the requirements for the operation, management and supervision of homes. The Code of Practice is issued by the Director under section 22, and sets out principles, procedures, guidelines and standards for the operation, keeping, management or other control of a home, for compliance by operators.

That hierarchy is where operators misread the document in both directions. The Code is not delegated legislation: the statutory minimums — the staffing table, the floor area figure, the duty to keep records — sit in the Regulation, and the Code reproduces them so that a home can work from one book. But the Code is not advice either. A licensee must comply with the Ordinance, the Regulation and the Code, as the Government set out in a Legislative Council reply on 22 June 2022, and the Code is the standard the Licensing Office of Residential Care Homes for the Elderly inspects against. A home that argues a paragraph is only guidance is arguing with the inspector's checklist.

The edition in force is the June 2024 (Revised Edition), updated in June 2026, published by the department as a single PDF with a separate annex volume of forms. It is worth knowing what date the text is pinned to. The Code states that the standards, specifications and statutory provisions it cites are those in force on or before 16 June 2024, which the Regulation calls the material date: the first anniversary of the gazettal, on 16 June 2023, of the Residential Care Homes Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Ordinance 2023 (Ord. No. 12 of 2023). Where the law has moved since that date, the Code's own sentence is not the last word — and the department publishes a running list of where it has moved.

Which chapter of the Code of Practice covers which duty

The Code runs to sixteen chapters and a set of annexes, and the chapters are organised by subject rather than by the order a manager meets them. The table maps each chapter to the duty it carries. Chapter numbers and titles below are as printed in the June 2024 edition as updated in June 2026; a home should check its own copy against the department's PDF rather than against a summary.

One absence is worth naming, because it is the question families ask most. There is no chapter titled residents' rights. The protections are distributed instead: the admission agreement and the rules on charges and possessions in Chapter 8, the restraint section in Chapter 12, the social care duties in Chapter 16, and the statement in Chapter 1 that residents should be given due respect and concern for a living with dignity and ageing with peace of mind. A home that wants a rights statement has to write one, because the Code does not supply a single clause to adopt.

What changed in the 2024 revision and the June 2026 update

The June 2024 edition is not a routine reprint. It is the edition that carries the Residential Care Homes Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Ordinance 2023 into the text, and that Ordinance was gazetted on 16 June 2023 with the majority of its provisions commencing on 16 June 2024. Two of its subjects were deliberately held back and are being implemented in phases: staffing, and the area of floor space per resident. That is why the current text contains requirements with dates in the future rather than in the past — the added nurse and health worker row for a care and attention home of more than 60 residents, which starts on the fourth anniversary of the material date, is the clearest example.

The revision also changed what a licence application has to contain. Under sections 11A to 11C of the Ordinance, an applicant must propose a management officer to be the responsible person of the home on the licence application, and on the first renewal application made on or after 16 June 2024 where the licence was already in force, and Chapter 3 now sets out the proposal, the consent statement, the vetting and the notice that follows. The home manager register is the other structural change: Chapter 10 was amended in June 2025 to add the requirement to employ a registered home manager or a registered home manager (provisional).

The June 2026 update is smaller but it lands on daily operations, and the department publishes it as an amendment record rather than as a new edition. Since the 2024 edition, that record lists these changes:

• December 2024, Chapter 5 paragraph 5.3 and Annex 5.1: revision of the fire safety requirements for the part of a home situated more than 24 metres above the ground floor and used for dormitory purposes.
• April 2025, Chapter 9 paragraph 9.7: deletion of the testing requirement for staff of homes.
• April 2025, Chapter 13 paragraph 13.5.4(b): update of the COVID-19 vaccination arrangement for residents, and deletion of footnote 43.
• May 2025, Annexes 3.1, 3.4, 3.7, 3.8, 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3: update of the email address in the personal information collection statement.
• June 2025, Chapter 10 paragraph 10.1: addition of the requirement to employ a registered home manager or a registered home manager (provisional), and update of the staff list form at Annex 3.2.
• June 2026, Chapter 5 paragraphs 5.4.3(d) and 5.5.4(b): a 1 kg dry powder type extinguisher at each nurse station, and a new standard of fire resistance for draperies and curtains.
• June 2026, Chapter 7 paragraphs 7.2.2 and 7.2.3: update of the CCTV installation, maintenance and repair requirement, and a new requirement for monitoring and reviewing CCTV recordings.
• June 2026, Chapter 8 paragraph 8.4.3 and Annex 8.1: update of the handling of charges in the admission agreement, and of the guidelines on fees, including records on the use of consumables and a resident's right to buy necessities personally.
• June 2026, Chapter 9 paragraph 9.1.1 and Annex 9.1: update of the minimum staffing requirement for nurses and health workers in a care and attention home, and amendment of footnote 36.

How a licensing inspection uses the Code of Practice

The inspection is not a reading of the document; it is a test of whether the home's own paperwork matches it. Four professional inspectorate teams sit under the Licensing Office — social work, health, building safety and fire safety — and they conduct surprise inspections at different times during office and non-office hours, as the Government described in the 2022 reply cited above. Where a home has failed a licensing requirement, the department issues an advisory letter, a warning or a written direction according to the nature and severity of the failure, and considers prosecution if the home does not improve.

What that means for preparation is specific. The records Chapter 8 requires must be available for inspection at any time, not assembled afterwards: the staff list, the duty list for each post, the monthly duty roster, and an attendance and outdoor duty record covering relief and contract staff as well as employees. A special incident must be reported to the Licensing Office on the prescribed form within 3 calendar days of the occurrence, public holiday included, which makes the log book and the accident record the two documents a home cannot reconstruct later.

For staffing, the yardstick is the home's own approved timetable. A home must formulate specific hours within the specified period, which the Regulation defines as 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., apply for approval before they take effect, and re-apply at least a month before any change. Because the Licensing Office inspects against the specific hours on file, the timetable a home applies with is also the timetable it is measured against. We set out the arithmetic itself, table by table, in the care home staffing ratio in Hong Kong.

Where a care home must have its own policy in writing

A recurring misunderstanding is that the Code supplies the policy. In most places it supplies the outcome and leaves the instrument to the home, and an inspection will ask to see the instrument. These are the written documents the current text calls for, by paragraph:

• The specific hours application, on the prescribed form, with the residents' schedule of activities and rest hours, the duty roster for the proposed hours, and job descriptions and duty statements for each staff grade (paragraph 9.1.4 and Annex 9.1).
• A written policy and mechanism for monitoring and reviewing CCTV footage, naming who monitors in real time and at what intervals, who reviews recordings, and how and when footage is extracted, with records kept for inspectors (paragraph 7.2.3).
• Internal guidelines controlling staff access to and use of residents' personal data, and measures to protect it (paragraph 8.10).
• For any handling of a resident's money, a signed letter of authorisation and a monitoring mechanism, with accounts and records open to inspection by residents, families, inspectors and caseworkers (paragraph 8.4.4).
• For restraint, an assessment, a written consent signed by a registered medical practitioner, the resident or family, the home manager and the staff member concerned, and an observation record with regular reviews (paragraphs 8.7.2 and 12.7).
• Isolation measures for residents who need them (paragraph 13.4), and a cleaning schedule the home draws up and implements (paragraph 15.2).
• Employment contracts for all staff and a policy of employees' compensation insurance, as Chapter 1 requires of an operator who is an employer.

The rest of the set, and where a monitoring system fits

The Code is one document, but a home's exposure is not one risk. Staffing is arithmetic against an approved timetable, set out table by table in the care home staffing ratio in Hong Kong. Importing staff is a quota application with a local recruitment test attached, in importing care workers for Hong Kong care homes. Registration is an individual question about one employee's certificate and its expiry date, in health worker registration in Hong Kong. The licence itself is an application with a window measured in months, in applying for a care home licence in Hong Kong. Floor area is a measurement with a phased timetable, in floor area per resident in a Hong Kong care home. The medical examination is a form that has to exist before admission, or within 3 calendar days after an urgent one, in the resident medical examination in a care home.

Nothing in the Code is satisfied by a purchase. The staffing table is a headcount on duty by grade; the CCTV paragraph is a recording system with a retention period and a written review policy; the record paragraphs are documents with dates on them. A home can meet the CCTV requirement and still fail the staffing row, and it can meet both and still fail to produce a special incident report inside 3 calendar days.

That distinction is the honest way to describe what our own product does. Steadicore is the monitoring system SilverGuard builds; it is not a compliance document, it does not appear in the Regulation or the Code, and nothing in either instrument provides for a lower minimum because a home has installed technology. What a monitoring system can do is cover the hours between rounds and leave a timestamped record of what happened and when it was answered — which is a record a home may later have to produce. We describe the product in those terms on its own page rather than in staffing savings it does not claim.