A missed visit is the one failure every health care service dreads. Someone waits for help that does not arrive, a family rings the office, and a commissioner starts asking questions. Late visits cause the same worry on a smaller scale, and they are usually the warning sign that a missed visit is coming.
The good news is that most missed and late visits have ordinary, fixable causes. This guide walks through them and shows what the office can do about each one.
Why visits get missed
When services look back over a month of incidents, the same handful of causes come up again and again:
- Rounds that were never realistic. Visits booked back to back with no travel time between them, so every call after the first one runs late.
- Last-minute changes that do not reach the carer. A hospital discharge, a cancelled visit or a new time agreed with a family, passed on by phone and forgotten.
- Unfilled visits. Sickness or a leaver leaves gaps in the rota that nobody spots until the call is already late.
- No one watching in real time. The office only finds out a visit was missed the next morning, when the paper timesheet comes in.
Plan rounds you can actually deliver
Start with the plan, not the day. Each person you support should have a weekly visit plan with fixed times, the length of each visit and the tasks to be done. Build rounds from those plans and include real travel time between addresses. A round that looks efficient on paper but ignores traffic will run late every day.
Group visits by area where you can, and keep a small buffer at the end of each round. It costs a little in travel time and saves a great deal in late calls.
Make changes reach the carer, every time
Every change to a visit should be made in one place, and that place should be what the care worker sees on their phone. If the office changes a time and the carer is still working from yesterday’s list, the change has not happened. A published schedule that updates the care worker app removes that gap.
Spot unfilled visits days ahead
An unassigned visit on Friday is easy to fill on Tuesday and very hard to fill at 7am on Friday. Check the coming week for visits with no care worker assigned every day, not just when the rota is written. In CEVERO Care the scheduling screen shows unassigned visits as a number at the top of the week, so the coordinator sees them as soon as they appear.
Watch the day as it happens
Electronic check-in and check-out lets the office see which visits have started, which are running late and which have not begun at all. Set a clear rule, for example that any visit not started 15 minutes after its planned time is followed up by phone. The care worker may simply have forgotten to check in, but the call is made either way.
Learn from every missed visit
Record each missed visit as an incident, with the reason and what was done. Review them monthly. If the same round, time of day or care worker appears again and again, you have found the cause. This record is also the evidence CQC will want to see under the Safe key question.
Share the figures with your team
Care workers want to do a good job. Sharing monthly figures for late and missed visits, and celebrating improvement, turns punctuality into a shared goal rather than a stick.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a late visit?
Most services and commissioners agree a tolerance, often 15 or 30 minutes either side of the planned time. Check your contracts and write your tolerance into your policy so everyone measures lateness the same way.
Do we have to tell anyone about a missed visit?
Tell the person and their family, record it, and check whether it caused harm. If it did, or it could have, follow your safeguarding procedure and any reporting your commissioner requires.
Will electronic call monitoring put carers off?
Not if it is explained properly. Carers generally value clear rounds, fewer surprise phone calls and pay that matches the hours they actually worked.
See how CEVERO Care helps: book a demo and we will show you live scheduling, check-ins and missed visit reporting on real screens.