Multiple visits a day to the same person

Most route planners assume one stop per destination. Give them a list of addresses and they will find a good order to drive them in — but ask for the same address four times, spaced through the day, and the model breaks down. The efficient answer is to do all four while you are there, which is exactly what nobody wants.

That pattern is normal in home care, and common in reablement, post-discharge support and any service working to a call schedule. A person needing help to get up, to eat, and to get to bed needs three or four separate visits at sensible intervals, from staff who are driving between other people in between.

Repeat visits are described on the appointment itself rather than by entering the same person several times. Five fields do the work.

Visits required

How many separate visits this person needs that day. Set it to 4 for someone on morning, lunch, tea and bed calls, and the scheduler places four rather than one. Left at 1, the appointment behaves like any ordinary single visit.

Minimum gap

The least time that must pass between one visit to this person and the next. This is what stops four calls being stacked into one convenient afternoon — efficient on paper, useless in practice.

Call purpose

Which part of the day a visit belongs to. Tagging visits as morning, lunch, tea and bed calls keeps each one in its own window without pinning any of them to an exact time.

Duration

Set per visit, not averaged across the package. A 45-minute morning call and a 20-minute tea call are different jobs, and averaging them is the usual reason an afternoon overruns.

Staff required

Two, where a visit needs two people. A package often needs a double-up at the morning and bed calls but not the ones in between, and each visit is set separately.

Say a client needs four calls: 45 minutes in the morning with two carers, 30 minutes at lunch, 30 at teatime and 30 at bedtime, no closer than three hours apart.

Visits required becomes 4. The minimum gap becomes 180 minutes. Duration is set per visit rather than averaged. Staff required is 2 on the morning call only. Each call is tagged with the purpose that matches its part of the day, so the morning call cannot drift into the afternoon.

Nothing in that describes an order or a clock time. The scheduler works those out, fitting the four calls around every other client on the round and around the staff member's own hours and breaks.

None of this is compulsory. Visits required defaults to 1 — an ordinary appointment, visited once — and the minimum gap then has nothing to apply to. A service doing one visit per person per day never touches either field, and the scheduler behaves as a straightforward route planner.

That matters because the same tool covers both. An occupational therapy team doing four long assessments a day and a home care service doing sixty short calls are running the same scheduler with different fields filled in. Mixed rounds work too: one client on four calls alongside twenty on one is a normal day, not a special case.

The field-by-field reference is in appointments, double-ups and repeat visits, and call purposes and time windows covers keeping each call in the right part of the day.