A double-handed call — a double-up — is one visit that needs two carers at the same time. It is the most common way a rota is half right: one seat filled, the other forgotten, and a person left waiting in a hoist sling for a second pair of hands that was never booked.
The decision comes from the moving and handling risk assessment, not from the rota. A person who is hoisted, who needs turning in bed, who uses a standing aid with support on both sides, or whose behaviour makes one carer unsafe, is assessed as needing two. The assessment should say which calls need two carers — often the morning and bed calls but not lunch — and the care plan should carry that into the weekly pattern so every generated call knows whether it is single or double.
The right model on the rota is one visit with two seats, not two separate visits at the same time. The difference matters:
On the carer roster, the same visit should appear on both carers' rows, so each sees it in their own day. On the service user's roster it is one call with two names. And an empty second seat must sit on the Unassigned row until it is filled, never hidden behind the first carer's name.
The two carers should also be rostered to arrive together. A double-up where the second carer is twenty minutes behind is a single-handed call for twenty minutes, which is exactly what the assessment said must not happen.
A one-hour double-handed call is two hours of care. That is how it is commissioned — the council is buying two carers' time — and it is how it should be invoiced and how the service user's weekly hours should read. A client with four one-hour double-ups a day has 56 hours of care a week, not 28, and a weekly hours figure that says 28 will be argued with at the first invoice.
Each carer, on the other hand, worked one hour. Their timesheet counts the call once. The rule to hold in your head: care hours count per seat; a carer's hours count per carer. Any total shown for a client, a day's operations or the company should count a double-up twice; any total shown for one carer should count it once.
Electronic call monitoring for a double-up needs two check-ins and two check-outs, one per carer, on the same visit. A single timestamp proves that one person came. Commissioners paying for two carers will ask, and the safeguarding question after an incident will be "who was in the room" — the record needs both names and both times. The call monitoring guide covers the rest.
Each of these is a rota rule, and rota software should enforce them rather than rely on a co-ordinator remembering at 06:45.
In Carelo a call is marked double-up on the schedule and every generated visit carries two seats: Carer 1 and Carer 2 (with an optional third seat for a shadowing carer). A double-up with an empty seat shows half-filled on every roster and sits on the Unassigned row until it is covered; the same carer cannot hold both seats; the visit appears on both carers' rosters and moves as one. Both carers check in and out on their own phones, and the call-monitoring report shows each. Client, operations and company hours count a double-up as two carers' time; each carer's timesheet counts it once. See the rota planning guide for the wider rules, or book a demo.
As two carers' time. A one-hour double-up is invoiced as two hours of care, because that is what was commissioned. The service user's weekly hours should read the same way.
Each carer is paid for their own hour. The call appears once on each carer's timesheet. Whether the rate differs for double-handed work is a matter for your pay policy.
The call is not covered. It should stay visibly half-assigned until the second seat is filled, and the manager should decide, with the assessment in front of them, what happens if it cannot be. It must never be quietly delivered single-handed.