Home care from the state: who is entitled and how to apply

The social service of home care is not charity and not anyone's favour, but something the state provides on application. Entitled to it are elderly people, people with disabilities, children with disabilities, people with severe forms of illness, including before disability is established, and people with mental and behavioural disorders.

The wording “elderly people” is important here: the ground is age and need, not disability. A person who simply cannot carry a bag and wash on their own falls under this service.

The service is provided on application, and this is the main thing to understand: it will not appear by itself. Without a submitted application no authority will learn of a specific person's need, however many years they live alone.

The application is submitted to the social protection authority at the person's place of residence or stay. In writing, this is the structural unit for social protection of the local state administration.

An application is accepted online by the Ministry of Social Policy's Social Portal soc.gov.ua and by the Diia portal. That is, going to an office is not required, and a queue is not a condition of receiving the service.

For the period of martial law the procedure for receiving residential care, palliative care and home care services has been simplified. What exactly has been simplified depends on the decisions in force, so before applying it is worth checking the current procedure at msp.gov.ua.

Then come three steps, and they are laid down in writing. First: an initial comprehensive assessment of the degree of the service recipient's individual needs. Second: drawing up an individual plan. Third: concluding a contract for the provision of the social service of home care.

The contract is concluded within five days of the decision. That is, after the decision things move quickly, and the long part is the assessment of needs.

An individual plan is not a formality: it determines the amount of help, that is, how many times a week a worker comes and what exactly they do. If the person's needs are described incompletely, the plan will be incomplete, and arguing afterwards is harder than saying everything at once.

The service may be provided free of charge, for a fee or with a differentiated fee, where part is paid by the recipient and the rest is covered by the budget.

What this depends on is determined by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 587 of 2020: it sets both the procedure for providing social services and the list of documents used to assess ability to pay. We deliberately do not name income thresholds here: they are not in the sources we rely on, and one must not invent numbers in a text about other people's money.

The documents in a typical case are these: a copy of the passport, a copy of the taxpayer registration card, a certificate of the medical and social expert commission if there is one, an income declaration. The full list is in the same resolution, and it is worth looking at it rather than at a list someone has rewritten.

There is a separate mechanism: compensation to individuals who provide care services on a non-professional basis, that is, without business activity. It is granted on application, and the procedure is described in the online guide on the Diia portal.

This matters for a family in which a daughter or neighbour already cares every day and does so for free. The state recognises and compensates such care, but only after an application, not after the fact.

Home care is help with household matters: tidying up, carrying, accompanying, calling a doctor. That is a lot, and the person is worse off without it.

But care does not buy a month of groceries and does not cover medicine. They are different things, and one does not replace the other.

Our part is exactly the second: a monthly grocery pack and medicine as needed, delivered by a fund helper. So the right order of action is usually this: first arrange what the state provides, and then see what is left uncovered.