What the licence covers
A DHA home care licence authorises a company to deliver healthcare in patients' homes: nursing care, elderly care, post operative support and similar services, each sitting inside an approved scope. The scope is the operative word. The licence is not a general permission to provide care; it is a defined list of services, and your team may deliver what sits on that list and nothing beyond it.
That makes the scope a commercial decision as much as a regulatory one. The services you intend to sell in year one, and the ones you expect to add soon after, should shape the application, because widening a scope later generally means going back to the authority.
The checklist
Stripped of the paperwork detail, the authority wants to see six things in place before a home care operation goes live.
A trade licence with the correct activity
The company comes first: a trade licence carrying the right healthcare activity, structured for a regulated operation. Foreign founders can generally own 100 percent, and a medical background is not required of the owner.
DHA initial approval
The authority's first gate, applied for through the Sheryan portal. Initial approval confirms the concept and lets the rest of the build proceed; the full licence follows once the operation is ready for review.
An approved operational base
Home care does not need a patient facing clinic, but it does need an approved base: a compliant administrative and storage premises from which the operation runs, set up to the authority's requirements.
A medical director
A licensed physician carries clinical oversight of the whole operation. The medical director is the clinical accountability in the structure, which is what lets a non clinical founder own the company.
Nurses, individually licensed and credentialed
Every nurse who enters a patient's home is individually licensed and credentialed under your operation. Credentialing runs per person, which makes the team the slowest moving part of the file.
The policy file
Home visit procedures, infection control, consent and record keeping, written to the authority's checklists. Inspectors generally read these before they look at anything else.
People are the long pole
On paper the licence looks like a documents exercise. In practice the critical path runs through people. Nurse licensing and credentialing carry their own timelines, each application moving at the authority's pace, and the operation cannot see a single patient until the nurses on the roster are credentialed under it.
The builds that land at months rather than quarters are the ones that recruit and credential in parallel with the licensing work, so the day the licence is issued is the day the team is ready to work, not the day recruitment starts.
After the licence
The licence is permission to operate, not proof that the next inspection will go well. Home care operations are generally expected to stay inspection ready: visit records kept properly, policies followed as written, and reporting submitted when the authority asks for it.
The simplest way to hold that standard is to make the file and the operation the same thing. If the infection control policy says equipment is handled a certain way, that is how the nurses handle it on every visit. The operation has to work the way the file says it does, because inspections exist to check exactly that.