Alerts & Monitoring 🚨

OnCare monitors your operations and raises alerts when something needs attention. Alerts give you visibility into what is happening across your care delivery, without needing to manually check every visit or every care worker.

All alerts are displayed on the Alerts Dashboard, accessible from the main navigation. Office staff also receive email notifications for each alert. Alerts are generated once a care worker has clocked out of a visit, not in real time. This means you will see the alert in the dashboard and receive the email notification after the visit has been completed. You will not receive alerts while the visit is still in progress.

This is critical for CQC compliance because regulators expect you to demonstrate that you have systems in place to monitor care delivery and respond to issues promptly. If a CQC inspector asks how you ensure visits happen on time or how you know when a care worker is not where they should be, your Alerts Dashboard and resolution history provide that evidence.

If you do not configure alerts or do not respond to them, you lose visibility into your operations. Late visits, missed medications, and location discrepancies will go unnoticed until a client or their family raises a complaint, or until a CQC inspection reveals the gap.

OnCare tracks four types of alerts:

Late visit alerts are triggered when a care worker checks in to a visit after the scheduled start time by more than the configured threshold. You can set the late visit threshold in Settings to 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. For example, if you set the threshold to 15 minutes, an alert is raised if the care worker checked in more than 15 minutes after the visit's scheduled start time. Late visit alerts help you identify scheduling issues, travel time problems, or care workers who are consistently running behind.

Missed medication alerts are triggered when a care worker marks a medication as "Not Taken" during a visit through the mobile app. The alert includes the reason provided by the care worker explaining why the medication was not administered. These alerts are important because missed medications can have serious health consequences, and your agency needs a clear record of when and why medications were not given.

Distance alerts (Geofencing) are triggered when a care worker checks in to a visit from a location that is outside the configured radius around the client's address. This could indicate that the care worker is at the wrong address, has not yet arrived at the client's property, or is checking in from a car park or nearby road. Distance alerts help you verify that care is actually being delivered at the client's location.

Report alerts are raised manually, not automatically. When a care worker adds an incident response to a task and taps Raise an alert for this report, OnCare creates a report alert here so office staff are notified. An incident response on its own is a task, not an alert, and will not appear on this dashboard unless an alert is raised for it. There is more detail in the Incident Reports section below.

All alerts appear on the Alerts Dashboard. Each alert shows the client name, care worker name, visit time, alert type, and any relevant details such as the reason a medication was not taken or the distance from the client's address.

The Alerts Dashboard includes filters that allow you to narrow down which alerts you see. You can filter by date, alert state (open or resolved), client, and alert type. This makes it easy to find exactly what you are looking for. For example, you could filter to show only missed medication alerts from the past week that have been resolved, or only open distance alerts for a specific client.

You can also download your alerts in CSV format. This is useful for reporting, auditing, and sharing data with managers or CQC inspectors. The CSV export respects whatever filters you have applied, so you can export a targeted set of alerts rather than the entire history.

When you resolve an alert, you add a resolution note describing the action taken. For example, if a late visit alert was caused by traffic, you might note "Care worker arrived 10 minutes late due to traffic, visit completed in full." For a missed medication alert, you might note "Client refused medication, GP notified."

Once a resolution is added, it automatically appears inside the visit report for that visit. The resolution includes the date, the time, and the name of the office staff member who managed the issue. This means anyone reviewing the visit report later (including CQC inspectors) can see exactly what happened and how it was handled, all in one place.

Resolved alerts also move into the resolved section of the Alerts Dashboard. You can use the date and alert type filters to review resolved issues. For example, you could filter to see only resolved missed medication alerts from last week to review how your team handled medication issues during that period.

It is important to resolve every alert, even if the issue turned out to be minor. An unresolved alert on your dashboard is a gap in your audit trail. CQC may ask to see your alert history and will expect to see that every alert was reviewed and addressed.

OnCare allows you to bulk archive multiple alerts at once. When bulk archiving, you are required to provide a reason for the archive. This keeps your audit trail intact even when processing alerts in bulk.

Bulk archiving is particularly useful for managers who need to clear a backlog of alerts that have already been reviewed, or for situations where a known issue caused a large number of alerts at once (for example, a system outage that triggered late visit alerts across all visits for a day). Rather than resolving each one individually, you can select multiple alerts, enter a single reason that applies to all of them, and archive them together.

This feature saves significant time while still maintaining accountability, because every archived alert retains the reason, the date, and the name of the person who archived it.

Geofencing controls how close a care worker must be to the client's address in order to check in without triggering a distance alert. To configure this, go to Settings and find the Distance alerts / Geofencing section. You can set the radius to one of the following values: 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100 metres. You can also turn distance alerts off entirely if you do not want to use this feature.

If a care worker checks in from outside the set radius, they will be asked to double-confirm their check-in. The office receives both a dashboard alert and an email notification, and the care worker's exact GPS location is recorded.

A radius of 20 to 30 metres works well for most clients. If you set it too tight (for example, 10 metres), you may get false alerts caused by GPS drift, especially in built-up areas or blocks of flats. If you set it too wide (for example, 100 metres), it may not catch care workers who are checking in from outside the property.

Geofencing relies on the client's address being correctly entered in their profile. If the address or postcode is wrong, distance alerts will trigger incorrectly. Always verify that client addresses are accurate, including the postcode.

OnCare also includes a feature that allows you to manually adjust the client's location on the map by dragging a pin to the exact position of their home. This is useful when the postcode or address does not place the marker precisely on the correct building, for example in rural areas, new-build estates, or blocks of flats. By placing the pin manually, you get much more accurate geolocation for distance alerts, reducing false triggers and improving the reliability of geofencing.

OnCare uses GPS with geofencing rather than QR codes for check-in. GPS is more reliable because QR codes can be damaged, removed, stolen, or fail due to phone camera issues. GPS also enables accurate travel-time and mileage tracking, which QR codes cannot provide.

Care workers can log an incident response directly from the mobile app during or after a visit, for anything unusual that happened during care delivery, such as a client fall, a safeguarding concern, property damage, or an aggressive encounter.

An incident response is a task, not an alert. On its own it does not appear on the Alerts Dashboard or the Audits dashboard, and it does not notify office staff automatically. To find incident responses, go to Reports and filter by Task. The incident response itself is just an open text box for recording what happened, not a formal report.

To escalate an incident, the care worker taps Raise an alert for this report at the bottom of the report. On the mobile app this sits just above the check-out button. That action creates a report alert, which does appear on the Alerts Dashboard, where you can filter for it and resolve it like any other alert. The task and the alert are two separate things: logging an incident response records it, raising an alert escalates it.

If you need a formal, structured incident report rather than a quick note, use Operational Documents (type: Incident). That gives you proper incident documents you can complete and keep on file.

Incident responses are separate from care notes. Care notes describe the routine care that was delivered. Incident responses flag events that require management attention or further investigation. Encouraging care workers to use incident responses properly is important for building a culture of transparency and for providing CQC with evidence that you take safeguarding seriously.

Office staff receive email notifications for all alert types. Make sure your notification settings are configured so that the right people receive alerts. If only one person receives alert emails and that person is off sick or on holiday, alerts could go unnoticed.

It is good practice to have at least two people set up to receive alert emails, so there is always someone monitoring incoming alerts even when a colleague is unavailable.

Before alerts work properly, you need to configure geofencing in Settings (set the radius and enable distance alerts), set the late visit threshold in Settings (choose 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes), set up eMAR for any clients on medication (so missed medication alerts can be generated), and make sure all client addresses are accurate in their profiles (so distance alerts trigger correctly). You should also consider manually adjusting the map pin for clients where the automatic address placement is not precise enough.

If any of these are not configured, the corresponding alert type will either not trigger or will trigger inaccurately.

Alerts tell you that something may need attention, but they do not resolve themselves. Office staff must review each alert, investigate if needed, and add a resolution. Alerts also cannot tell you whether care tasks were completed correctly. A care worker can be at the correct location, but the alert system cannot verify whether the care plan tasks were actually completed. For that, you need to review care notes and task completion records separately.

Alerts are not generated in real time. They are generated after the care worker clocks out. This means you cannot use alerts to intervene during a visit that is in progress. If you need to contact a care worker during a visit, you will need to call them directly.

Check the Alerts Dashboard at the start of every day and at least once more in the afternoon. Resolve every alert with a clear note, even if the issue was minor. Review your geofencing radius every few months to make sure it is still appropriate. Make sure at least two office staff members are set up to receive alert email notifications. Use the filters and CSV export to run regular reviews of alert patterns, such as recurring missed medications or repeated late visits on a specific route. Use bulk archiving to efficiently manage large volumes of alerts while keeping your audit trail clean. Document your alert monitoring procedures so CQC can see your process during inspections.