MQA vs GDA vs Nurse: Which Do You Actually Need at Home?
The difference between a General Duty Attendant, a medically qualified attendant and a home nurse — and how to work out which one your situation calls for.
Families arranging home care for the first time are usually working from a hospital discharge summary and a lot of guesswork. The terminology does not help: attendant, caretaker, GDA, nurse and ayah get used to mean roughly the same thing, and the price difference between them is substantial. Getting the choice right matters both clinically and financially.
General Duty Attendant (GDA)
A GDA provides non-clinical daily care. Bathing and hygiene, feeding, helping someone walk or transfer from bed to chair, repositioning a bedridden patient to prevent pressure sores, toileting and incontinence care, and companionship.
A GDA does not give injections, does not set up IV lines and does not perform sterile dressing changes. That is not a gap in their training — it is the definition of the role.
Choose a GDA when the patient is clinically stable and the need is practical: an elderly parent who cannot bathe alone, someone recovering from a fracture who needs help moving, a bedridden patient needing hygiene care and repositioning.
Medically Qualified Attendant (MQA)
An MQA does everything a GDA does and adds clinical work: prescribed injections and IV fluids, sterile wound dressing, vitals monitoring, medication management, catheter and Ryle's tube care, and — importantly — the judgement to recognise when something is going wrong.
Our MQAs include GNM and B.Sc. qualified nurses, ICU-trained nurses and certified attendants with clinical training.
Choose an MQA when there is any ongoing clinical requirement: post-surgical wound care, an injection or IV course, a catheter or feeding tube, or a condition where deterioration needs to be caught early.
Home nurse
In practice the overlap with an MQA is large, and the distinction is mostly about formal registration. Where a doctor has specified that a registered nurse must perform a particular procedure, that is a genuine requirement — say so at booking. For the overwhelming majority of home care needs, an MQA is fully equipped. Our home nursing page covers what the role includes.
A practical test
Ask one question: does anyone need to make a clinical judgement in this house today?
If the answer is no — the patient is stable, the medicines are oral, there is no wound and no tube — you need a GDA, and paying for an MQA is spending money on capability you will not use.
If the answer is yes — there is a wound that could get infected, an injection that must be given correctly, a patient whose vitals could shift — you need an MQA, and economising here is a false saving. The cost of a readmission dwarfs the difference.
The case most families miss
You often need both, at different intensities, and the need changes over time.
A typical post-surgical arc: 24-hour MQA cover for the first week while the wound is fresh and mobility is poor; step down to a 12-hour MQA day shift in week two; move to GDA cover once the wound has closed and the need is mobility and hygiene; drop to one-off wound dressing visits as the frequency falls.
That progression costs a fraction of holding 24-hour clinical cover for a month, and it matches what the patient actually needs at each stage. Providers who will not let you step down are selling you a package, not care.
When you only need a procedure
If the requirement is genuinely one task — an injection course, a fortnightly catheter change, a weekly dressing — do not book a shift at all. A Quick Medical Service is a single visit from ₹599. Families routinely over-buy here, booking 12-hour cover for something that takes twenty minutes.
Still unsure?
Describe the situation to us on +91-8796560382. If a GDA is enough, we will tell you that. We would rather place the right person than the expensive one, because the families who stay with us are the ones who were not oversold at the start.