Working without a signal

Caregivers work in basements, rural homes and apartment blocks where phones lose their signal. A portal that stopped working without a connection would mean missed clocks, forgotten tasks and paper notes typed up later. So the portal is built to carry on offline and catch up once it is back online.

What the phone keeps

While the caregiver is signed in, the portal reads ahead their shared visits for the coming days - a week unless your agency sets otherwise - with each visit's tasks, breaks and miles. It refreshes them in the background when it opens, when the connection comes back, and every so often while it is in use.

Everything kept on the phone is encrypted, and only the signed-in portal can read it. Signing out removes the client details it was holding.

What a caregiver can do offline

• Clock in and out, answer tasks, and record breaks, miles and, if your agency allows them, expenses.
• Read their messages as the phone last saw them, and write replies.
• Fill in forms and have them signed in person, and read and acknowledge documents such as a client's plan of care.

The work waits on the phone, in the order it was done, and is sent by itself once there is a connection. Sending the same thing twice does no harm, so a patchy connection cannot record a clock or an answer twice.

What the office sees

Offline work arrives late, and CareComplete treats it with appropriate care:

• A clock made offline keeps the time the phone recorded, but it is not trusted on its own. It arrives as waiting for office approval, with the reason, for the office to approve.
• Online, a caregiver cannot clock out while a required task is unanswered. Offline, the clock-out is accepted anyway, since the phone cannot check, and the open tasks are flagged for the office.
• An announcement that must be acknowledged at clock-in can be put off with Continue for now, and is asked again once connected. Until then it shows under Still to acknowledge.
• If a form or document changed while the phone was offline, what was signed or acknowledged is kept against the version the caregiver actually saw, and they are asked again on the current one.

Advice to give caregivers

• Open the portal once with a connection before heading to the week's visits, so the phone has the latest.
• Do not sign out with work still waiting to send. If someone else signs in on the same phone, unsent work from the first caregiver is lost.
• Keep a screen lock on the phone. It is what protects the portal if the phone is lost while signed in.

For what caregivers see day to day, see What caregivers see in the portal.