The on-call support service for care teams
When someone calls in sick at 6am, OnCall Care shows you every gap, every person at risk, and exactly who can cover. Fill rota gaps with the right people, not just available people.
UK-hosted · CQC-inspection ready · no long contracts
A carer calls in sick and the on-call manager starts dialling from a spreadsheet, from memory, one number at a time, while the visit clock runs down.
The first person to say yes may lack the PEG training, have never met the client, live 40 minutes away, or already be over safe working hours.
When CQC asks how last month's gaps were covered and why, the answer lives in call logs, texts and memory, not in anything you can show.
One screen for the whole incident, from sickness call to signed-off handover
Log the sickness and every affected shift becomes a visible gap, with the people at risk flagged and a countdown to each visit.
Send cover requests to ranked candidates by push notification, watch seen / declined / accepted update live, and assign in one tap.
Open items roll into an auto-drafted handover the next on-call person accepts, with both signatures timestamped.
Every decision, decline reason and escalation is recorded as it happens. Inspection evidence with zero extra admin.
Every suggestion explains itself
OnCall Care scores every candidate on verified skills, familiarity with the person, distance, contracted hours, availability and restrictions. Then it tells you why, in plain English, so the decision stays yours and the reasoning goes in the audit log.
- Hard blocks for restrictions and missing required skills
- Warnings, with the numbers, for working-time and fatigue risk
- Continuity protected: familiar faces rank first
"Sarah is a strong match: PEG verified, worked this package 14 times, available from 18:00, already nearby, under her weekly hour limit."
Rotas that build themselves, and show you the gaps before they bite
Set each person's weekly pattern once: day, night or 24-hour slots, single or double-up. Assign a named carer, rotate a team, or leave slots open for matching.
Future weeks are generated automatically every Sunday from your patterns. Change the pattern and the future rota follows; what's already published never moves without you.
A client who needs two people at all times shows 1/2 staffed the moment one slot is filled, on the planner itself, so double-up visits never quietly go out half-covered.
The rota is not paged. Scroll from last month into next in one motion, in week or day view, and the weeks either side are already there - so you spot the Tuesday you are short before you go looking for it. Staff get the same timeline on their phone.
Staff set overtime availability on their phone: dates, nights, weekends, maximum extra hours. The match panel sees it instantly, so nobody rings people who can't come.
Familiar faces matter. Continuity is measured per person, warned on every rota change, and reported so you can evidence it to families and commissioners.
A live competency matrix: verified skills, evidence documents, expiry reminders. Expired training visibly blocks matching before it becomes a safeguarding issue.
The rota argues with you before it goes out, not after
Working time, holiday and employment status are checked as the shift is assigned - by the database, not by a form. Every check says which rule it is enforcing, and anything overridden records who did it.
Average weekly hours are tracked per person, and an assignment that would breach the limit is refused rather than flagged. Unpaid travel counts towards it: payment appears nowhere in the Working Time Regulations' definition of working time, which is a detail rota software routinely gets wrong.
Regulation 21 disapplies the daily and weekly rest rules for care work, so a hard eleven-hour block stops almost every realistic rota. You get a warning naming the rule instead, and the override is recorded against a person. Whether reg 21 applies to you is your setting, with a documented default.
Three accrual methods, including the 52-week average of paid weeks. A zero-hours carer whose hours are actually steady is not an irregular-hours worker, so the usual 12.07% underpays them - and a fixed calculation gives them nothing at all. Both are common, and both are wrong.
Immigration hour caps, and the eight-hour night limit where the work involves special hazards. Not a setting defaulted to off - there is no switch and no code path, and the schema rejects one. Breaching those is a criminal matter for the provider, so the product will not help you do it.
A regulation 5 opt-out is recorded with its dates, and ending one derives the notice date rather than leaving somebody to work it out. Ending it today blocks a lawful rota; never ending it quietly removes a protection the worker asked for.
Since 6 April 2026, failing to keep holiday records for six years is a criminal offence. The accrual ledger is that record - not a report you have to remember to run - and it starts the day you switch on.
What we do not claim: the Employment Rights Act 2025 zero-hours package is law but is not in force until 2027 and the numbers in it are still undecided, so nobody can sell you compliance with it today. What we can do is record your rolling hours, shift offers and cancellations now, so you have the history on day one. Where a rule is genuinely contested it is a setting with a documented default, never a decision baked into the code. More on how we handle your data.
Cover requests your team actually answers
One push notification with the shift, the skills, the rate and why they were matched. Accept or decline in two taps, with a reason. Today's rota, availability and expiring training all live in the same app, for iOS and Android.
Team leaders get the whole on-call desk, not a cut-down view of it: open gaps, the ranked matches with their reasons, who cannot be asked and why, sending the request and approving the reply - from a phone, at 2am, without opening a laptop. Everything sits behind a PIN with Face ID or fingerprint unlock, because this data is confidential.
The notification itself carries a person's initials and the shift time, never their name. Push delivery is the one thing that leaves the United Kingdom, so it says the least it can while still being useful on a lock screen.
Numbers your board and your inspector both ask for
Gaps, sickness trends, overtime spend, skill coverage, continuity, on-call response times and cover outcomes. Filter by branch, export for evidence.
Illustrative figures from a pilot deployment.
The everyday people admin, handled in the same place
Cover is only half the job. OnCall Care also runs the HR basics a care business lives on, all feeding the same availability and matching engine.
Staff request annual, sick or unpaid leave from their phone; managers approve in one click with a note back. Approved leave blocks the rota automatically, so nobody is scheduled onto a beach.
Every sickness logged in the support service becomes an absence record with a timeline, so patterns and trends build from day one and show up in reports.
Staff clock in and out from the app, checked by GPS against each client's location with a radius you set. Out-of-range events are flagged, never blocked, and a missed clock-in alerts your managers within 15 minutes.
Publish a policy and everyone is asked to read and accept it in the app, each acceptance timestamped per person, so "I never saw that policy" stops being a conversation.
A live skills matrix with evidence documents, verification and expiry reminders. Verified training feeds the matching engine; expired training visibly blocks assignment.
Staff log mileage between visits, prefilled at the HMRC approved rate - 55p a mile since April 2026 - or an out-of-pocket expense. The rate is yours to change. Approvals notify them instantly and sit ready for payroll.
Simple per-carer pricing
Start with the on-call layer alongside your current rota. No setup fee, no long contract.
- Support service & incident log
- Smart matching with explanations
- Cover requests & mobile app
- Handover & audit trail
- Everything in On-Call
- Full rota builder & templates
- Skills matrix & expiry tracking
- Full reporting suite
- Multi-branch & group reporting
- Payroll & care-system integrations
- Custom retention & DPIA support
- Dedicated onboarding
Questions providers ask us
Do we have to replace our current rota system?
No. Most providers start with the on-call layer running alongside their existing rota, then move scheduling across when they're ready.
Does the system assign staff automatically?
No. It suggests and explains; a person always makes the decision. Restrictions and missing required skills are hard blocks that cannot be assigned past silently.
Where is our data held and who can see it?
UK hosting, in the London region, with strict per-organisation isolation, role-based access and row-level security. Sensitive notes are permission-controlled and every access is audit-logged. GDPR-aware workflows and DPIA documentation are included.
Does GPS clock-in track staff all day?
No. Location is checked once, at the moment someone clocks in or out, against the client's address and a radius you control (10 to 500 metres). There is no background tracking, and an out-of-range clock-in is flagged for review rather than blocked.
How does OnCall Care compare to BrightHR or Birdie?
We keep an honest, regularly updated comparison, including the things other platforms do that we don't yet, on ourcomparison page.
We say "service users", not "clients". Can we change the wording?
Yes. Clients, service users, people supported or packages: pick your term once and the whole product, including the mobile app, uses it.
See your worst rota day, handled well
Bring a real scenario: last month's hardest gap. We'll walk it through the support service live, with your terminology and your shift types.
30 minutes · no obligation · we'll never contact your staff