The purpose of this study was to investigate the home care needs in a rural county as a basic study to develop a Korean home care model. A stratified cluster sampling method was used to select 1, 352 household which accounted for 8.8% of Youn Cheon County population. A Standard criterias for home care subject were delineated by five nursing professors representing five different areas of nursing specialty. The developed criteria for home care subjects were as below, 1) Patients who had been discharged from hospital during the previous week. 2) Patients with special medical devices 3) Newborns and the mothers. 4) The chronically ill with poor recovery or control of disease. 5) Subjects with poor health care behavior or ability 6) Subjects with poor social support and / or family resources. 7) Subjects with health related educational needs. Three types of questionnaires were developed to screen home care subjects, one for adults, one for infants and one for the elderly. Also different questionnaire items were developed to evaluate the control and self care ability of chronically ill subjects. After training in interview methods for 2 days, 39 interviewers visited individual households for interviews. As the results of the study showed that 14.1％ of adult subjects and 76.5% of infants and child were judged as having at least one criterion related to home care need, 15.69% of adults and 53% of elderly had at least one chronic illness. The most prevalent chronic illnesses were hypertension, skeletal-neurological disease and diabetes. The prevalence of subjects with home care needs were, those with poor health care behavior(8.89%), with health-re-lated educational needs(8.71%), with poor recovery or control of disease (3.52%), and with poor social support and inadequate family resources(3.19%). There were only 0.3%, 0.37%, 0.11% who were discharged patients, patients with medical devices, or newborns respectively. Thus, the largest home care client group were those who need direct health care and health education. Seventy five percent of the subjects responded that they were willing to use and pay for home care service if it is offered in the future. It is suggested that recently discharged patients and patients with special medical devices can be cared for by hospital based home care nurses, but other home care clients can be cared for by com-munity based home care nurses.