How to stop missed visits in home care

• Travel that was never in the plan. Two visits twenty minutes apart with five minutes between them. The second is late every day until it is missed.
• Nobody told the office. A carer is ill, or a car will not start, and the first the coordinator hears is a family phone call.
• Silent rota gaps. A visit unassigned on a spreadsheet looks like every other cell.
• Finding out too late. If a missed visit shows up on a timesheet on Friday, it was missed on Tuesday and nobody could do anything.

None of these are about bad carers. They are about the office not being able to see.

Put the actual drive between addresses into the rota, at the time of day the visit happens. Group visits by area. If the round does not fit, the fix is a different round, not a carer driving faster. A scheduling tool that knows where each client lives will do the arithmetic; a spreadsheet will let you lie to yourself.

A map on the office screen showing who has started which visit turns a Friday surprise into a ten o'clock decision. The carer taps on arrival, the visit turns green. Nothing turned green by ten past? That is when you act. Proving a visit happened uses the same tap for evidence.

Reports are read tomorrow. Alerts are seen now. Set a rule: a visit not started fifteen minutes after its slot sends a message to the coordinator. Half the time it is a carer running late who will get there; the other half is the missed visit you just prevented.

When a carer drops out, the coordinator needs three things in one place: who is trained for that client, who is free, and who is nearest. If those live in three places the visit is missed while somebody looks. Keep the skills, the availability and the location together and cover becomes a two-minute job.

A late visit that is explained is an apology. A missed visit that is discovered is a complaint. A family portal that shows the visit has started, or that it is running late, takes the reassurance phone calls off the office line and takes the sting out of the bad days. Exhale Care Solution does all five of these on one screen; each of them is worth doing even if you do the first four on paper.