Home visits

Switching them on

Settings → Home visits → tick We do home visits. Choose your base, the site travel and mileage are measured from (its address needs a postcode). In Settings → Services & prices, tick Home visit on any service that's always done at the patient's home, such as a domiciliary nail cut.

Booking a home visit in the diary

Click a time as usual. For a home-visit service, or after ticking Home visit, enter the visit address and postcode; it starts from the patient's address on file. No room or equipment is needed. Staff can book outside your area (you know the patient); patients booking online can't.

Travel time in the diary

Travel to and from each home visit shows as a small grey block with a car, before the visit: minutes and miles, estimated from the postcodes (straight-line distance × 1.3 at your average speed, rounded up to 5 minutes). That time is kept free: nothing is booked into it online, and a booking or move in the diary that leaves too little time is stopped and says why. You can choose to book it anyway (it's recorded). Travel from your base to the first visit of the day is shown but doesn't block the start of your hours. A red block means the gap is shorter than the journey.

Online booking and your area

Tick Patients can book home visits online and set your area: a distance from the base (as the crow flies), or a list of postcode districts (CH47, CH48) or whole areas (CH). Patients enter their postcode first; only those inside the area see times, and they give their address before paying. Home visits aren't offered from the waitlist automatically.

The day route

Diary → Day route (or the button on the diary) shows one clinician's day in order, made for a phone: each visit's time, address, a Directions button that opens maps, the drive between visits with a "leave by" time, and the day's total miles (including the drive back to base), driving time and charges. Clinicians see their own route; reception and the owner can pick anyone.

Callout and mileage charges

Under Charges, set a flat callout charge and/or pence a mile (from the base to the patient, one way), with any free miles. The charges are worked out when the visit is booked, shown to patients booking online, and added to the bill at checkout and on the invoice. Changing them later only affects new bookings.

Lone working

Tick Clinicians check in and out of home visits. On their day route, clinicians tap Check in on arrival and Check out when they leave. If someone hasn't checked out within the minutes you set after a visit's end, the person you choose (or the owner) is emailed with the visit's address, once. The owner can check someone out once they've reached them.

If a postcode isn't found

Postcodes are looked up with the free postcodes.io service and remembered. If one can't be found, travel uses the minutes you set for unknown postcodes and no mileage is charged; correct the postcode to fix it.