What families actually ring about #
Sort a week of family calls and they fall into a short list, and it is the same list in every service:
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Who is coming today, and roughly when
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Did yesterday's visit happen, and did anything change
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Why is it a different carer this week
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Something I was told would be sorted and has not been mentioned since
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A question about an invoice or a council contribution
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A worry about mum, which is not an information request at all
Five of those six are requests for facts the service has already recorded. The sixth is a conversation, and it is the one that deserves the coordinator's full attention, which it rarely gets because the other five got there first.
The consent question comes before everything else #
Information about a person's care belongs to that person. A relative is not automatically entitled to it, and being the one who arranged the care does not change that. Who may be told what depends on the person's own wishes, on their capacity, and on any legal authority somebody else holds. In practice that means the answer is set per person and recorded, not configured once for a whole service.
On the data protection side, care information is special category data under UK GDPR. The ICO sets out the Article 9 conditions, including the health or social care condition, and its guidance includes a worked example about care home staff and residents' data. Those pages are linked at the foot of this one. We are not going to interpret them for you, because the interpretation that matters is the one your own DPO or adviser signs off.
Which parts run on rules #
Once the consent position is recorded for a person, a narrow set of factual updates is genuinely rule based, because every one of them is triggered by something the service has already logged:
- A visit recorded as completed, where a named contact has agreed to be told
- A planned change of carer or visit time, sent when the rota changes rather than after the family notices
- A scheduled weekly summary built only from facts already in the record
- An acknowledgement that a message was received, naming who will come back and when
- A prompt to the office that a family has been promised something and not heard back
That last one is worth dwelling on.
Which parts never do #
- Anything evaluative: how somebody seems, whether they are declining, whether the care is working
- Anything about a concern, an incident, a safeguarding matter or a fall
- Anything about a complaint
- Anything to do with a death
- Anything where consent is unclear, which means the default is a person picks up the phone
And nothing, ever, that reads as a care judgement dressed as an update.
There is a commercial argument for the same line. The relationship with a family is most of what a private client is buying, and an automated message in the wrong moment costs more than the call it saved.
Why this shows up in an inspection #
Families sit inside CQC's feedback from partners evidence category, alongside commissioners and health professionals. A service that communicates predictably has a supply of that evidence without doing anything special. A service that does not is relying on the goodwill of people it has kept waiting.
The volume side of this is on the office phone, and if you want to count the calls before changing anything, the missed call calculator uses your own numbers.