What staffing software has to prove

Deployed is not rostered

Regulation 18 requires sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced persons to be deployed. A rota is a statement of intention made in advance, and intention is not what the word deployed describes, so the rota on its own answers a different question from the one being asked.

The difference shows up the moment somebody calls in sick. A clinic that swapped a session, brought in a locum and carried on has done nothing wrong, and will struggle to show it if the swap lived in a message thread. The evidence that survives is a record of the day as worked, held in the same place as the plan so the two can be compared without anybody reconstructing them.

Cover, and scope of practice

The follow up question after who covered is almost always whether that person could do what they covered. A nurse covering a clinic list is a different fact from a nurse covering a clinic list that included procedures outside their competence, and a name in a rota slot does not distinguish them.

This is where most scheduling products stop being useful, because they model people and times rather than people, times and what each person is permitted to do. A clinic that holds scope of practice somewhere other than the rota will answer this question from two systems and a memory.

Registration checks lapse quietly, and nobody is told

Regulation 19 asks for staff of good character with the qualifications, competence, skills and experience necessary for the work, and it is not satisfied by a check performed once. A professional registration can lapse, be suspended or acquire conditions at any point, and none of those events notifies the clinic that employs the person.

The practical control is a date of last verification held per person, somewhere a human looks at rather than a folder nobody opens. The stronger control, which very few clinics have, is that the registration status and the ability to be rostered are connected, so that an expired check is visible when somebody tries to schedule rather than months later.

The test worth running before you buy

Pick a week three months ago and request four things from the system. Who was planned, who actually worked, who covered any gap, and the registration status of each of them on that date. The answer tells you more than a demo, because a demo shows the happy path and this question lands on the joins between modules.

Most systems answer the first instantly, the second with an export, the third from somebody's memory and the fourth from a spreadsheet. That is not a disqualification. It is a map of how long the evidence takes to assemble, and assembling it under time pressure is the thing worth avoiding.

What we are not claiming

This page describes what the regulations require and what systems can evidence. It is not legal advice and does not substitute for your registered manager's judgement or for CQC's own guidance. Where a decision turns on detail, the legislation linked below governs rather than this summary of it.

wai is not CQC registered and makes no claim to be. CQC registers providers of regulated activities rather than software suppliers, so the registration and the duty stay with the clinic.

Where wai sits

wai holds the clinic's diary, the clinicians and the record in one place, so what was booked, what happened and who was in the room are facts from the same system rather than three. Every read of a patient record is logged against a named role.

What that buys is that the planned against worked comparison is a report rather than a reconstruction. We are not a human resources system and do not claim to replace one, and the wider map of which regulations a clinic's systems answer is in software and CQC, what is actually being assessed.

Run the four part test above on us with a real past week. If the answer takes us longer than it should, we would rather you found out before buying. Clinicians still decide what enters the record.

Frequently asked questions