The Care Certificate Overview
The Care Certificate is an identified set of standards that health and social care workers adhere to in their daily working life. Designed with the non-regulated workforce in mind, the Care Certificate gives everyone the confidence that workers have the same introductory skills, knowledge and behaviours to provide compassionate, safe and high quality care and support.
The Care Certificate was originally developed by Skills for Health, Health Education England and Skills for Care. In 2025 a review of these standards was undertaken by Skills for Health and Skills for Care with input from NHS England and the Department for Health and Social Care. The revised Care Certificate is now based on 16 standards, all of which individuals need to complete in full before they can be awarded their certificate:
- Understand your role
- Your personal development
- Duty of care
- Equality, diversity, inclusion and human rights
- Work in a person-centred way
- Communication
- Privacy and dignity
- Fluids and nutrition
- Awareness of mental health and dementia
- Adult safeguarding
- Safeguarding children
- Basic life support
- Health and safety
- Handling information
- Infection prevention and control
- Awareness of learning disability and autism
Each standard is underpinned by full learning outcomes and assessment criteria.
Care Certificate updated resources (2025)
As well as the standards themselves you can find a series of additional resources to help you to use the Care Certificate with your staff. The standards were updated in March 2025 to align with sector developments and the introduction of the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate qualification.
Care Certificate resources (pre-2025 update)
The old versions of the Care Certificate Standards, Assessor document, Self-Assessment tool, Care Certificate template and FAQs can be found below.
Care Certificate eLearning
The Skills for Health Care Certificate eLearning bundle provides a set of high-quality online courses aligned to the Care Certificate standards. The bundle is designed to complement work-based assessment of skills by a competent assessor. The course is designed for all staff working in the fields of health and care who are working towards the Care Certificate.
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Skills for Health are one of the architects of the Care Certificate, therefore, you can be assured that our training is directly designed to meet those standards with first-hand knowledge of what those requirements are.