Before buying IT support for a care home, agree exactly what happens when something fails outside normal office hours. Ask who answers, which faults qualify for urgent help and who takes responsibility when the problem involves a software supplier. Get those answers in the service agreement, not just a sales conversation.
Prepare the shift team as well as the contract. A manager’s contact list is little use if it sits in the email account nobody can open. Digital Care Hub’s continuity audit asks providers to consider loss of access to main IT systems, power cuts and broadband failure.[4] Use those scenarios to check both the support you are buying and your own arrangements.
Define the hours and the person who answers
Ask the provider to write down its staffed support hours, including weekends and bank holidays. Outside those hours, does a call reach an engineer, an answering service or a voicemail queue? If monitoring runs overnight, ask who acts on an alert and whether staff can report a problem themselves. Avoid treating monitoring and staffed support as interchangeable promises.
Confirm which people at the home can raise an urgent incident. Give the night lead a route that does not depend on the office manager being awake. Ask about any additional charges, call-out approval and restrictions on on-site attendance. Keep the agreed answer with the contract so a change of manager does not leave the next team guessing.
Describe the disruption, not just the broken device
Agree examples of urgent incidents before signing. A single spare tablet failing is a different situation from the whole shift losing access to a care-record system. Ask how the provider assesses priority, who can escalate it and what information staff should supply. Describe the affected work without putting resident details into an ordinary support message.
Keep the first response separate from the fix. Ask what a response target means: acknowledgement, an engineer starting work or a substantive update. Then ask how progress will be communicated while the fault remains unresolved. Do not plan the home’s downtime arrangements around an assumed repair deadline that the agreement never promises.
Decide who coordinates the different suppliers
Walk through a practical example with the proposed provider: the tablets connect to Wi-Fi, but the care application will not load. Who checks the network, contacts the application supplier and keeps the shift lead informed? Ask for a named coordinating role rather than accepting that staff should ring everyone until somebody takes ownership.
Record the boundaries between your IT provider, broadband company and care-software supplier. Include customer references and verified support numbers, but keep passwords out of the contact sheet. If a third party needs the home’s authorisation to discuss an account, arrange that through its approved process before an incident. Confirm who takes over when the usual contact is unavailable.
Give each shift a usable downtime plan
Keep a controlled copy of the essential instructions somewhere authorised staff can reach without the affected systems. Ask the registered manager to approve the care procedures and the software supplier to confirm any supported offline functions. This article is about arranging technical support; it does not replace the home’s approved procedures for delivering care during an outage.
Make the instructions specific enough for a colleague covering a different shift. Identify where approved downtime materials are kept, who decides to activate them and how updates reach the incoming team. Digital Care Hub’s audit explicitly asks whether a plan covers loss of access to main IT systems and for how long.[4] Agree what happens if the disruption continues into the next day.
Rehearse the handover without disrupting care
Run a short discussion exercise with day and night representatives. Start with a hypothetical broadband outage and ask the team to locate the contact route and explain the next steps. Do not unplug live equipment or interrupt care systems to prove a point. Record missing numbers, unclear responsibilities and any instructions that depend on an unavailable person.
Digital Care Hub recommends testing the continuity plan, then signing and dating it so future staff can refer to it.[7] Give each issue an owner and a review date. Include the handover back to normal working: the manager and relevant software supplier should agree how information recorded during downtime is checked and reconciled through approved procedures.
Bring one scenario to your support review
Take your current agreement, supplier contacts and one out-of-hours scenario to the next review. Ask the provider to explain what it would do, what it expects your staff to do and which parts remain outside its responsibility. Request written clarification wherever the answer is vague.
If you are reviewing IT support for your care home, talk to BMT about the gaps you have identified. Start with the support hours and escalation route your team needs, then agree a scope you can check. Keep the agreed contact route and responsibilities with the shift team’s downtime instructions.
Sources
[4] https://www.digitalcarehub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/BCP-Audit-tool-FINAL.docx
[7] https://www.digitalcarehub.co.uk/data-protection-and-cyber-security/businesscontinuity : Business continuity planning, Digital Care Hub