Sample policy · Domiciliary care

Visit scheduling, missed and late visits policy (domiciliary care)

Statutory anchor: Regulation 9 (person-centred care), Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 (SI 2014/2936). This policy also engages Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment), Regulation 17 (good governance) and Regulation 18 (staffing). · primary source

1. What the regulation says

The care and treatment of service users must be appropriate, meet their needs, and reflect their preferences. (Reg 9(1): the headline duty)

carrying out, collaboratively with the relevant person, an assessment of the needs and preferences for care and treatment of the service user (Reg 9(3)(a): collaborative assessment)

The full text of the regulation is at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/2936/regulation/9. Where this policy and the regulation diverge, the regulation wins.

2. Plain-English summary

Care and treatment must be appropriate, meet the service user's needs, and reflect their preferences. The regulation lists nine specific things you have to do to deliver person-centred care, including: assessment with the service user, designing care to meet their preferences, involving them and the people supporting them in decisions, providing information, making reasonable adjustments, and considering well-being when meeting nutritional and hydration needs.

3. Purpose

For a person who depends on care at home, a late visit can mean missed medicine, a missed meal or being left without help to get up. A missed visit can cause real harm. This policy sets out how the Service plans visits so they can be delivered on time, how it watches visits as they happen, and what it does the moment a visit runs late or is at risk of being missed, so that no one is left without the care they need.

The Service must verify this policy against current regulations and its own commissioning contracts before adoption, as many local authority contracts set their own missed-visit reporting rules.

For the medicines side of the same risk, pair this policy with the domiciliary care medication support policy template.

4. Scope

This policy applies to:

5. Roles and responsibilities

6. Scheduling and live-monitoring procedure

The Service follows this procedure:

  1. Agree the visit plan. Record the agreed visit time, length, task, criticality, time-sensitive needs and any preferred worker or access requirement.
  2. Build a deliverable rota. Add realistic travel time, worker availability, skills, continuity, break time and known route risks.
  3. Identify critical visits. Flag visits involving time-critical medicines, food, fluids, continence care, pressure-area care, getting up or going to bed, or a person who may be unable to seek help.
  4. Monitor visit start. Check live call-monitoring or manual confirmation so a late visit is seen while there is still time to act.
  5. Act on the flag. Contact the worker, arrange cover where needed, tell the person or representative and record the action.
  6. Escalate risk. Where essential care cannot be delivered safely, contact health, social care, safeguarding, emergency services or the commissioner as appropriate.
  7. Close the event. Confirm whether care was delivered, late, shortened, missed or replaced by another safe action.
  8. Review patterns. Review repeated late starts, routes, workers, areas, call lengths, travel assumptions and commissioner requirements through governance.

7. What counts as a late or a missed visit

The Service uses clear definitions so that staff respond at the right moment:

The Service confirms these definitions and time windows and records them.

8. Planning visits so they can be delivered

The Service plans rounds that can realistically be delivered:

9. Watching visits as they happen

The Service monitors visits in real time so that a problem is seen quickly rather than discovered later:

10. When a visit is running late

When a visit is flagged as late, the office:

  1. contacts the worker to find out where they are and how long they will be
  2. for a critical visit, or where the delay is significant, sends another worker so the person is not left without care
  3. tells the person, and their family or representative where appropriate, that the visit will be late and roughly when to expect it
  4. records the late visit and the action taken

11. When a visit is at risk of being missed

If a visit cannot be delivered by the planned worker, the office arranges cover urgently. A visit is never simply dropped. For a critical visit, cover is arranged as the first priority, and if no worker can attend in time the office contacts the person, their family or representative, and where there is a risk to health, the relevant health service, so the person's essential need is met another way.

12. When a worker gets no answer at the door

If a worker arrives and cannot get into the home or gets no reply, they do not simply leave. They follow the no-access procedure:

  1. try to contact the person, by knocking, ringing and phoning
  2. check for an agreed reason for no access (for example the person is out, in hospital, or has another arrangement that day)
  3. contact the office or on-call contact
  4. follow the agreed access route, such as a keyholder, family member or key safe, where one exists (see the entry to the home, keys and access policy)
  5. where there is reason to fear for the person's safety, call the emergency services and stay until help arrives, unless told otherwise

The Service records the steps taken and the outcome of every no-access event.

13. Telling the person and those who matter to them

When a visit is late or missed, the Service tells the person and, where agreed, their family or representative, plainly and promptly. It says what happened, what is being done, and when care will arrive. The Service is honest about a missed visit rather than letting it pass unmentioned.

14. Records, reporting and register links

The record should include:

Late and missed visits that create risk are linked to the incident register. Repeated patterns are added to the risk register or improvement-actions register. Complaints about visit timing are linked to the complaints register so the pattern view is not split.

15. Learning from patterns

The Service reviews late and missed visits together at the governance meeting. It looks for patterns by round, area, time of day and worker, and asks whether the cause is scheduling, staffing, travel or something else. Where a pattern points to a fixable cause, the Service raises an improvement action and tracks it to completion with evidence.

16. Training and supervision

Staff involved in scheduling, monitoring or delivering visits must be trained on the Service's late, missed and no-access definitions, real-time monitoring process, escalation thresholds, commissioner reporting rules, safeguarding triggers, recording expectations and honest communication with people and families.

Supervisors should review late and missed-visit records in supervision where a worker repeatedly starts late, fails to report delay early, records visit times inaccurately or does not follow the no-access process.

17. Audit cadence

The Service checks, on a stated cadence, that:

The Registered Manager reviews the results and records the improvement actions that follow.

18. Sources and further reading

This template is based on CQC's guidance for providers and managers, the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, and other topic-specific legislation and guidance listed below. It is a starting point for adaptation, not a substitute for legal, clinical, HR, safeguarding or specialist professional advice.

19. Related reading

20. When to seek further advice

Seek specialist advice where the issue involves serious harm, safeguarding, deprivation of liberty, restraint, children, professional misconduct, controlled drugs, radiation, termination of pregnancy, infection outbreak, water safety, employment dismissal, DBS barring referral, or regulatory enforcement.

21. Document control

Version Date Author Changes
v1.1 2026-07-12 Verivius (sample) Added roles, scheduling and live-monitoring procedure, record fields, register links, training and supervision controls.
v1 2026-06-10 Verivius (sample) Conformed to the Verivius policy standard: added statutory anchor, verbatim regulation text, plain-English summary, sources and document control. Existing operational sections preserved.

This sample policy template was issued by Verivius. It is a template, not a substitute for legal advice or the tenant's own policy-development process. Where this template and live law or regulator guidance diverge, the live source wins.

What good looks like here

Written from an ex-CQC inspector's chair, but the point is safe, well-led care your team can stand behind. Each row shows what strong evidence looks like, what thin evidence looks like, and where the expectation comes from.

Home care is the one setting where the person is alone between visits, so a call that does not arrive is noticed by nobody except the person least able to do anything about it. A round runs in sequence, so twenty minutes lost at the first visit is still lost at the last, and the call that gets squeezed is usually the evening or bedtime one for someone who cannot get themselves to bed. The people most exposed, someone waiting for insulin, for a hoist transfer, for continence care or for their only hot meal of the day, are rarely the people who will ring the office to chase it. That is why the trail this policy leaves matters: the criticality flag in the care plan, the actual start time, the cover decision and the call made to the person let a manager tell the difference between a service running a little late and a service quietly failing named individuals. An inspector reads the same trail, but it earns its keep long before that, on the evening someone would otherwise have been left in a chair until morning.

  1. The office sees a late or missed visit while there is still time to act, not when a family member phones to ask where the carer is. A visit not started by a set point after its planned time is flagged automatically, and the office acts on the flag.

    Strong evidence: The real-time call-monitoring or manual confirmation of visit start, the automatic flag when a visit has not started by a set point after its planned time, and the record that the office acts on each flag rather than waiting for the person or a family member to call (sections 6 and 9).

    Weak evidence: The service owns an electronic call-monitoring system but nobody has set or written down the point at which a visit counts as not started, so on paper nothing is ever late. Or the alert log shows flags raised and left unacknowledged for hours, and the first entry on a missed visit is an inbound call from a daughter asking where the carer is. The flag threshold itself is a Verivius default rather than a statutory interval, so what matters is that the service has set one, recorded it and can show it is acted on.

    Our recommended baseline. Not a legal or regulatory requirement, but a sensible standard we suggest where the rules leave the detail to you. Adapt it to your service.

  2. Critical visits are identified in the care plan and given cover first, not just defined in the policy. Time-critical medicine, food, fluids, continence or getting-up calls are flagged and prioritised when cover is short.

    Strong evidence: Critical visits identified in the care plan and named so cover is arranged for them first, the stated definition of a critical visit, and the audit confirming critical visits are identified in care plans and prioritised (sections 6, 7, 8 and 17).

    Weak evidence: The policy defines a critical visit in clear terms but the care plans carry no criticality field at all, so the definition never reaches the rota. Or the opposite: every visit is marked critical, which means nothing is prioritised, and the cover log shows the early insulin call was the one dropped because it sat at the end of a round. Assessing and mitigating the risk of harm is the statutory duty; the mechanic of arranging cover for critical visits first is a Verivius default.

    Our recommended baseline. Not a legal or regulatory requirement, but a sensible standard we suggest where the rules leave the detail to you. Adapt it to your service.

  3. A missed or late visit that may have harmed someone is routed to the local safeguarding process and, separately, tested against whether a statutory notification to CQC under the Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009 is required. A safeguarding referral to the local authority does not discharge the notification duty, and a notification does not discharge the safeguarding referral. Both questions are asked and answered on the record, not conflated.

    Strong evidence: The record that, where a missed or late visit may have caused harm or placed a person at risk, the Service raises a safeguarding concern under local procedures and considers whether a notification to the regulator is required, with the event linked to the incident register (section 14).

    Weak evidence: A single tick box labelled safeguarding or notification, so you cannot tell which of the two questions was asked. Or a local-authority safeguarding referral was made and the separate question of whether a statutory notification to the regulator was required was never recorded either way, leaving an entry that reads "local authority informed" and stops there.

    A legal duty. This comes from legislation that applies to your service, so meeting it is not optional. The exact provision is cited beneath the badge.

    Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009, reg 18(2)(a) and (e); Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, reg 13(3)

  4. 'Care delivered' on the record means care that was really delivered, and the actual start and finish times reflect what the person received rather than what was planned. Where the commissioning contract requires it, missed visits are reported to the commissioner within the time that contract sets.

    Strong evidence: The rule that workers do not mark care as delivered unless it was delivered, the record fields for actual start and finish time or the reason the visit was not delivered, and missed visits reported to the commissioner where the contract requires it within the time the contract sets (sections 5 and 14).

    Weak evidence: Actual start times that match the planned time to the minute on every visit, which means the record was completed in the office rather than at the door. Visits marked as delivered with no finish time, or a call shortened to ten minutes logged as a full visit. Commissioner reporting that is a spreadsheet sent when someone remembers, with nothing on file showing what reporting window the contract actually sets. The record-accuracy duty is statutory; the reporting window is set by the commissioning contract, not by law.

    Something your commissioner or funder requires through your contract, for example an ICB or a local authority. It applies because you agreed to it, not because the law demands it of every service.

  5. The person and their family or representative are told plainly and promptly when a visit is late or missed, not left to notice it themselves. The Service is honest about a missed visit rather than letting it pass unmentioned.

    Strong evidence: The record of contact made with the person, family or representative and the requirement to say what happened, what is being done and when care will arrive (sections 10, 13 and 14).

    Weak evidence: An entry that says "family informed" with no time, no name and no note of what was said, so there is no way to tell whether the person was told before or after the care was due. Or the missed-visit record reads "not attended" with no contact logged at all, and the person found out when nobody came. Ringing the person to say a visit is running late is a Verivius default rather than a statutory duty; where a missed visit meets the Regulation 20 notifiable-safety-incident threshold that applies to the provider type, with health service bodies under reg 20(8) and any other registered person under reg 20(9), the duty of candour applies separately and is owed to the person.

    Our recommended baseline. Not a legal or regulatory requirement, but a sensible standard we suggest where the rules leave the detail to you. Adapt it to your service.

  6. Repeated late and missed visits are reviewed for their cause and closed with an improvement action, not logged event by event. The pattern is reviewed by round, area, time of day and worker, so the cause is fixed rather than the same people being let down week after week.

    Strong evidence: Late and missed visits reviewed together at the governance meeting for patterns, improvement actions raised and tracked to completion with evidence, and the links to the risk register or improvement-actions register (sections 14, 15 and 17).

    Weak evidence: Forty late-visit entries each closed individually with "worker delayed in traffic" and no one asking why the same round produces the same delay every Tuesday. Governance minutes that carry a count of missed visits with no cause analysis, and improvement actions with no owner, no date and no closing evidence, still open from the previous three meetings.

    A legal duty. This comes from legislation that applies to your service, so meeting it is not optional. The exact provision is cited beneath the badge.

    Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, reg 17(2)(a) and (b)

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Last verified 20 July 2026

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Last reviewed 10 June 2026