Niro
Home Care Provider Agreement
This Agreement is between Xtramile Consultancy Services (Pvt) Ltd of Town Mosque Road, Akkaraipattu 02, 32400, Sri Lanka ("Niro", "we", "us") and you, the person offering home care services through Niro ("you", "the Carer").
You accept this Agreement when you switch on your home care profile. If you do not accept it, you may still hold a Niro account; you simply will not appear to families.
1. What Niro is, and is not
Niro is an introduction platform. We connect families looking for home care with the people and institutions offering it, we verify what we say we verify, and we handle payment. We do not employ you, supervise your work, direct how you carry it out, or provide care ourselves.
As an individual carer on Niro you are an independent service provider offering companion services. You decide which bookings to accept, which services you offer, and when you are available; the hourly price of each service is set by Niro and is the same for every companion. Nothing in this Agreement creates a contract of employment with Niro, and you are responsible for your own taxes and statutory contributions.
Personal and nursing care — the caregiver and nurse levels — is offered through Niro only by an institution with a Home care department, using staff it employs. If you are a qualified caregiver or a registered nurse, section 2 explains how that works for you.
2. Your level, and staying inside it
Niro records your level after a person reviews your documents:
- Companion — company and supervision, meal preparation, light housekeeping, errands, escorting to appointments, and reminding a patient to take medicine.
- Qualified caregiver — everything above, plus hands-on personal care: bathing, toileting and continence care, dressing, feeding assistance, transfers and manual handling, and repositioning for pressure care.
- Registered nurse — everything above, plus clinical work: wound dressing, catheter care, injections, administering medicines, tube feeding, observations and post-operative care.
As an individual, you are offered to families for companion services only, whatever your level. Caregiver and nursing work is booked by families from an institution, and you may do it through Niro only as that institution's staff: the institution finds your verified profile, sends you an invitation in the app, and you accept it. From then on you set your availability — mornings, afternoons and nights for the coming two weeks — for its desk to see, and the desk assigns visits to you. Assigned visits appear in your visits list with the institution's name; the visit itself runs exactly as any other. For that work the institution is the provider, its insurance applies, and it pays you. You may be on the staff of more than one institution, and either you or the institution may end the arrangement at any time; visits not yet started go back to its desk to reassign.
You must not perform work above your level, even when the family asks you to, and even when they insist. This is the most important term in this Agreement. Refusing is not rudeness and it is not optional: it is what you have agreed to do. The family has agreed to the same boundary in their own terms, and Niro will support your refusal.
Two consequences follow. Work above your level is unsafe for the patient. It is also very likely uninsured, which means that if something goes wrong, neither you nor the family is protected.
You must not change your level, and you must not describe yourself to families as holding a qualification you do not hold.
3. Medicines
Reminding is not administering. A companion or caregiver may remind a patient that it is time to take their medicine and may hand them a box. Only a registered nurse may administer medicine, only as the assigned staff of an institution, and only when a registered doctor has prescribed it.
You must not:
- administer any medicine that has not been prescribed by a registered medical practitioner;
- supply, bring or sell medicines — the family obtains them from a pharmacy;
- administer controlled or dangerous drugs in a home setting;
- give a first dose of an injectable antibiotic at home. First doses carry a risk of severe allergic reaction and belong in a facility with resuscitation available.
Before administering anything, check the patient's allergies, which are shown to you in the Niro record for that booking. Record what you gave, the dose, the route and the time.
4. Safety, and when to stop
You must:
- tap "On my way" when you set off, with an honest estimate of when you will arrive, and tell the family as early as possible if you cannot come;
- check in when you arrive by scanning the patient's Niro QR code or entering the family's arrival code, with your location switched on, and write the visit note and check out when you leave — honestly. A check-in without proof is allowed so that nobody is kept at the door, but it is recorded as unproven and counts in your reliability record. These times and places are recorded on Niro's servers, together with how they compare with the booked start and with your own estimate. Falsifying a visit record ends your access to Niro permanently;
- ask in the app, not the family, if a visit needs to run longer. You may request one to six extra hours; the family approves or declines, and only approved time is paid;
- report an incident in the app — a fall, an injury, damage to property, or care refused — as soon as it is safe to, during the visit or within 48 hours. The family, the institution where there is one, and Niro are told at once;
- call 1990 Suwa Seriya in an emergency, and then use the Emergency button on the visit, which tells the family and the institution's desk at the same time.
You may stop work and leave at any time if you feel unsafe, if you are being harassed, or if you are being asked to do something outside your level. You will be paid for the time you have worked. Tell us what happened using the report button in the app.
We keep a reliability record for every carer — on-time rate, lateness, unproven check-ins, no-shows and strikes — and use it to decide who continues to be offered to families; an institution sees the same record for its staff. If you have not set off 30 minutes after the booked start, or are more than an hour past the arrival time you gave, the family is told and may cancel at no charge. A visit you never check into is cancelled as a no-show 24 hours after its booked end and counts against you. A visit you never check out of is closed automatically shortly after its booked end — about 30 minutes, longer only while an extra-time request is awaiting the family — and reviewed by us before anyone is paid. Repeated lateness or no-shows lead to strikes, suspension and removal under section 10; falsifying a record ends your access outright, as above.
If you are delayed on the road, add travel time in the app — the family sees the new arrival at once, and your clock runs from it. An hour past the arrival time you gave — including any travel time you added — without checking in, the visit is cancelled as a no-show at that point, not at the 24-hour mark.
5. Privacy and conduct
You will see personal and health information about the patient. It is theirs, not yours.
You must not:
- discuss the patient or their household with anyone outside their care;
- photograph or record the patient, their home, or their documents, or post anything about them on social media — with no exception for "harmless" pictures;
- accept money, gifts, loans, property, or bank cards from the patient or their family, or become involved in their financial affairs. Shopping with money given for that purpose, with receipts returned, is the only exception;
- introduce anyone else into the household, or bring another person to a booking, without the family's agreement.
These rules protect you as much as the patient. A carer who never handles a patient's money cannot be accused of taking it.
6. Insurance
Covered by Niro. As an individual companion, injury to a person or damage to property in the home is covered for you by Niro's group public liability policy while you are on a visit booked and recorded through Niro. You do not buy or upload anything for this, and families see it on your profile as "Covered by Niro". The cover applies only to visits booked through the app: a job taken off the platform is a job you are not insured for.
Covered by the institution. When you work as the assigned staff of an institution, the institution's own public liability and professional indemnity insurance applies to that visit, as the institution has declared to Niro and to the family. Niro's group policy does not cover caregiver or nursing work, and you no longer give Niro your own indemnity details.
Remember that insurers refuse claims for work outside the scope of a policy, and that Niro's group cover does the same. Work above your level, or off the platform, is the clearest example: it is uninsured whichever policy would otherwise answer.
7. Background checks
You must give us, and keep current:
- proof of identity;
- a police or character certificate;
- your qualification, if you are a qualified caregiver or a registered nurse: NVQ certificate, or Sri Lanka Nursing Council registration. This is what lets an institution find and invite you.
The person who verifies your documents records their expiry dates. We remind you 30 days and 7 days before a certificate or registration expires. When one expires your profile stops being offered to families, and an institution's desk can no longer assign you, until you upload the renewed document and it is verified — this is automatic and is not a penalty.
You must tell us promptly if you are charged with or convicted of any offence, if your professional registration is suspended, restricted or withdrawn, or if any of the above ceases to be true.
8. Payment
Families pay through Niro, and we collect the payment on your behalf. When you accept a booking we place a hold on the family's card, or charge it where a hold is not possible, and the money is kept only once the visit is complete. Extra hours approved by the family are added at the same hourly rate.
Your payout account. Before you can be paid, add your bank account in the app — bank, branch, account number and the name on the account — together with a photograph of the passbook page or a statement header showing that name. A person at Niro checks that the name matches your verified identity; payouts go only to a verified account, and any change to the account details is verified again before the next payout.
When you are paid. A completed visit becomes payable 48 hours after it ends, once the dispute window has closed. We pay by bank transfer once a week, on our payout schedule, for everything that has become payable, less our commission, which is shown to you before you accept a booking. Balances under LKR 1,000 are carried to the next week. Your Earnings screen shows every visit — gross, commission, net, and when it was or will be paid — and a monthly statement.
There is no payout for a visit that is voided, recorded as a no-show, or refunded in full. If a family cancels after you have set off, or turns you away at the door, a call-out fee of 30% of the visit amount (minimum LKR 500, never more than the visit amount) may be charged to the family and is paid to you.
Institution visits. When you are assigned a visit by an institution, the family pays the institution through Niro, and the institution pays you under your arrangement with it. Those visits do not appear in your Niro earnings.
Repeating visits. A family may book a visit to repeat for up to four weeks. Each occurrence reaches you as a new request six days ahead, which you accept or decline as usual; you may switch on automatic acceptance of repeat visits in your profile if you prefer.
Do not ask a family to pay you directly, and do not accept direct payment, including for extra hours. Taking work off the platform removes the family's protection, removes yours, and removes the record that shows you were there and what you did. It also ends your access to Niro.
If a family offers, tell them the booking must go through the app, and report it.
9. Ratings
Families rate you after a booking, and you rate them. Ratings are shown on your profile. We remove reviews that are abusive, that identify a patient, or that we can see are retaliatory — but we do not remove a review simply because it is unfavourable.
10. Ending this Agreement
You may stop offering home care at any time by switching your profile off.
We may suspend or remove you, without notice where the risk is immediate, if you work above your level, falsify visit records, breach the privacy or financial rules above, let your insurance or checks lapse and do not correct it, take payment off the platform, or if we receive credible reports of unsafe or abusive conduct.
Where we suspend you over an allegation, we will tell you what it concerns and give you an opportunity to respond, unless doing so would put someone at risk.
11. Complaints and disputes
If something goes wrong on a booking — for you or for the patient — report it in the app within 48 hours of the visit ending or being cancelled. We will look at the visit timeline, the check-in proof, the incident reports, the messages and both accounts of it, and decide whether the charge stands, is reduced, is refunded, or whether a call-out fee applies. The decision is recorded on the visit. On an institution's visit the institution is the other side of the dispute, and it is told the outcome.
We are not the arbiter of a clinical dispute or a claim for injury. Those go to the insurer that covers the visit, the family's, and where relevant to the Sri Lanka Nursing Council or the courts. Our role is the platform, the record, and the payment.
12. Law
This Agreement is governed by the laws of Sri Lanka.
Contact
privacy@niro.lk for anything about information and records. For anything else, use the report or help option in the app.