Your home's own forms and procedures, built once and used everywhere.

One care form builder for the child, the home and the team

The same builder makes a debrief with a young person, a weekly fire check and an interview pack. Click a question and type over it, press Enter for the next option, drag to reorder, and use the small gear for the rest. Preview it at phone, tablet or desktop width — and for a care form, as the young person or an inspector would see it.

Questions can take short and long answers, numbers and dates, yes or no, choices, scores, a member of staff, the young person's own words, photos and files, signatures, body maps and tables. Changes save as you go and stay a draft until you publish. Every filled form keeps the version it was filled on, so editing a form later never changes what somebody was asked or what they signed.

• Who checks it

  Nobody, any manager, or named people. A form set to be checked waits for them, and they approve it or send it back with a reason.

• Required or critical

  A required question stops a form being sent. A critical one lets it go with a reason for the blank, kept on the record.

• Who sees each answer

  Mark a question to show to the young person, to an inspector, or to neither.

• Shared lists

  Type a list of choices once — injury types, rooms, vehicles — and use it in any question.

Conditions, written as sentences

A condition reads like the rule it is: show this question when “Was anyone hurt?” is “Yes”; this question must be answered when…; call this question something else when…. A question hidden by a condition is stored blank and is not required, on screen and when it is saved.

Renaming an option renames the rules that point at it, so changing your wording never breaks them.

What happens next, decided by the home

Under any question you can say what happens when it gets a particular answer. On a care form that can start one of the home's procedures or mark the record for the regulator's attention. On a staff-file form it can complete a checklist item, keep it open, close a candidate's file, or confirm or extend probation. A form's settings can also ask named people to read it, tell people it was sent, and run the home's procedures when it is sent.

Procedures are the home's own. Choose what sets one off — an incident, a physical intervention, a missing episode, a complaint, a medication error and more — or a rhythm such as weekly or monthly, then add steps with owners and deadlines. A step can name a form, and sending that form finishes the step. Every decision a procedure takes is logged, including when it did nothing and why.

Careframe arrives with a starting set of forms and procedures, some already switched on. All of it is the home's to rename, reword, switch off or delete.

Make Careframe's built-in records your own

The daily log, incident, physical intervention, missing report, keywork session and the rest are built-in records. There are 40 of them in the Form library. On each one you can add your own questions under ours and put everything back as shipped whenever you like, and on most you can also reword a question or hide an optional one. A few, such as a medication dose, take added questions only, because stock and balances are worked out from their answers. The questions the app itself relies on — which child, when, the account, signatures, amounts — stay locked, and the builder says why.

Copy as my own form turns a built-in record into an ordinary form in your library, free to change completely. The original keeps doing its job in the app; the copy is simply yours.

The forms staff fill in elsewhere — requests, compliance checks, home finance, the rota and timesheets — take the home's own added questions too.

Staff-file forms use the same builder

Interview packs, references, the starter pack and the probation outcome are built with the same builder and filled in on the same screen. A referee or a new starter fills theirs in from an emailed link, without an account, and the answer lands on the staff file. A reply from outside the home can keep an item open or set a renewal date, but never close a file or move probation on.

A staff file and a child's record never share a table. A manager can build care forms without being able to open any child's record, and a staff form cannot carry a child's record.

Policies, procedures and the documents that describe the home

The Statement of Purpose and the children's guide are written in Careframe, with the questions grouped the way your nation groups them. Each is kept as numbered versions and locked once finalised, and the children's guide records which young people have been given the version the home works to now.

Questions people ask

Read next

• Care for the child
• Staff files
• Compliance
• Inspection ready