Who is covering next month?
The honest answer is usually “most of it”, and the gaps are the part worth knowing in April rather than on a Saturday morning. Hera plans the month against what your carers have actually told you they can work.
Tue 5 May · 09:00 · Mrs Iqbal — no carer assigned: weekly cap reached (Sarah Doyle, 37h).
Next month’s rota
It will not book a carer who cannot be there.
You will not find out on a Saturday. Availability they have declared, no two visits at once, hours left in the day, and the weekly cap — 37 hours unless you change it. Those are hard limits, and nothing overrides them.
Within those limits it ranks: does this carer have the skills this visit needs, is this the carer the client asked for, and have they been before. Continuity earns a carer up to fifteen points of preference — and it can never win against a skill the visit requires. Somebody who has known Mrs Iqbal for a year still does not get her insulin visit without the certificate.
It runs the whole month as a dry run first. You see the result before a single visit is written.
When it cannot fill a slot, it tells you which of five things stopped it
That is the difference between a gap you can fix and a gap you have to sit and work out.
- 1No carer was free — at that day and time
- 2Weekly cap reached — every available carer was at their hours limit
- 3No hours left that day — they had already worked their daily maximum
- 4Already on another visit — the times overlap
- 5No active carers — nobody was available to plan at all
On the board
Seventeen kinds of conflict show live, including the one nobody else puts in writing:
“412.5h demand against 380.0h capacity. 32.5h short.”
That is a hiring decision, not a rota problem, and you would rather know in April.
Start with next month’s rota.
Your first month is complimentary, with no card. Put a real month in and see where the gaps are while there is still time to fill them.