How we decide what to show you

Deterministic, not predictive

The Care Check applies a fixed set of published rules to your answers. The same answers always produce the same plan. There is no machine-learning model deciding what you see, and nothing about your situation is inferred beyond what you told us.

Each recommendation carries a “why this may be relevant” list, drawn directly from your answers. Relevance is not eligibility.

What the check does not do

• It does not assess health, capacity or care needs. It is not a clinical tool.
• It does not decide or predict eligibility. Assessment and funding decisions belong to the HSE, local authorities and the Department of Social Protection.
• It does not estimate how long you will wait or how many hours will be approved.
• It does not diagnose dementia or any other condition.

Ordering

Recommendations are ordered by how closely they match your answers — the setting, the concerns you selected, urgency, whether a service is already in place, and whether a family carer is involved. Ordering is never influenced by payment.

• We do not accept payment to include, rank or reorder public schemes or factual guidance.
• Private care is shown as a clearly separated optional pathway, never as a better option because it is paid for.
• If a commercial relationship exists with a named provider, that relationship is stated on every page where the provider appears.
• We do not take referral fees for nursing home placements.

How we treat changing facts

Rates, means thresholds, contribution rules and waiting times change. We hold them as structured data with a source and a review status rather than as page copy, and where we have not verified something we don't publish it. In practice this means we describe how a scheme works and send you to the official source for the current numbers.

We also don't publish names, phone numbers or contact details for local offices unless they are verified. An unverified number that sends a family to the wrong place costs them a day they may not have.

Home Support Tracker

Home Support Tracker is a structured record of publicly reported home support waiting-list figures, held as dated observations rather than as page copy.

• Every observation stores the date the figure refers to, the geography it covers, what it counts, the publishing source and any definitional notes.
• New applicants waiting and existing recipients awaiting additional hours are stored separately, because combining them changes the meaning of the number.
• A figure published for an HSE health region stays a health-region figure. We never divide it between the counties the region covers.
• Nothing reaches a public page until an editor has read the source document and marked the record verified. A source we have linked but not yet read is marked as awaiting extraction, and no figure from it is shown.
• Where the HSE says it does not collate a measure — waiting times, for example — we leave it empty rather than estimate it.
• A trend indicator is only shown when at least three verified observations exist for the same area on the same definition.
• Replacing a figure never deletes the old one: the earlier observation is marked superseded and kept, so changes over time stay visible.
• Aggregate figures describe a system, not a person. They cannot predict when an individual's service will start.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, we want to know. Tell us and we will correct it or remove it.