Sometimes staff ask about something your policies do not cover. Gap detection brings these moments together so you can act on them.
What you will see
- Common questions your policies do not currently answer.
- How often each of these has come up.
- A coverage score that gives you a simple headline figure.
How to use it
- 1Open the gap report in your portal.
- 2Look through the questions staff have asked that are not yet covered.
- 3Upload or update a policy to fill the gap.
Regulation coverage
Alongside staff questions, the report checks your policies against the regulations you are assessed on. It reads the actual content of every policy in your library, not just the titles, and works out which regulations are fully covered, which are only partly covered, and which are a gap.
Matching is deliberately careful, so you are never pointed at a policy that only looks related. Each regulation goes through three checks. First, a policy is only considered if its content is genuinely close in meaning. Second, the match is judged against the specific required elements of that regulation, not just the general topic. Third, a separate strict review has to confirm the match before it stands. If it does not, the regulation is treated as a gap.
Because it reads every policy in full, a re-run works through your regulations in batches and can take a few minutes on a large library. The button shows live progress as it goes, and you can keep working while it finishes.
The number in that progress counter, for example 24 of 74, is the number of regulations, not policies. The check works through your regulations one at a time, and for each one it searches across your whole policy library, so every policy is considered for every regulation. A home with hundreds of policies still sees the count run up to its number of regulations, because that is the question being answered: which regulations are covered, partly covered, or a gap.
When a gap sits in a policy you already have, the "what to add" guidance points to the exact spot and, where it makes sense, gives you a suggested replacement that builds on your own wording rather than starting from scratch. It keeps the specifics already in your policy, such as named roles and legal references, and adds what was missing, so you are enriching your text, not losing it.
Role-holder names in your policies
You can personalise your policies with the names of the people who hold each role. Turn on "Show role-holder names in policies" under Settings, then Organisation details. When it is on, the first time a role is mentioned in a policy it shows the person in brackets, for example "Care Manager (Lenny Burgess)". If a role is shared, all the names are shown.
The names come from your role-holders, which fill in automatically from your staff. Give a staff member the Care Manager position and they become your registered manager; assign the matching specialist role and they become your safeguarding lead, infection prevention and control lead, dignity champion, Caldicott Guardian or fire safety officer. You can add extra names by hand too.
This is applied when a policy is shown or downloaded and never changes the saved policy, so it stays up to date on its own. If someone leaves and you update the role-holder, the name updates everywhere without a re-run.
Approving and publishing policy updates
When you adopt a gap fix, it is applied to an editable copy of your policy as a tracked change. Your original upload is never touched, and nothing goes live to your staff until it has been approved. You can see every adopted change, preview the finished policy, download a print-ready copy with your letterhead and sign-off, and revert anything before you approve.
Approvals run in stages, and you decide how many stages you want. An admin always approves first. From there the update can go to your care manager for a second approval, and then to an external person for a final approval, before it is published.
- 1An admin opens the policy, reviews the adopted changes, and approves.
- 2If care manager approval is on, the update appears in your care manager’s Policies hub for a second approval. Any of your care managers can approve it.
- 3If external approval is on, a one-off link is emailed to the person you choose. They read the policy and approve it or send it back with feedback.
- 4Once every required approval is in, the new version is published to your staff and their Q&A answers from it straight away.
The two approval toggles
You control the workflow with two switches under Settings, then Organisation details, in the "Policy approvals" panel.
- Require care manager approval. When on, an admin’s approval sends the update to your care manager’s Policies hub for a second approval. When off, an admin’s approval publishes the policy directly, and it still appears in the care manager’s hub under "Recently updated" so they can see what changed. Turning this off suits smaller homes where an admin is trusted to approve on their own.
- Require external approval. When on, once the internal approvals are in, the policy is sent to an external person, such as a consultant or trustee, on a one-off link to approve or send feedback. The policy only goes live once they approve. You set who to send it to on the policy review screen.
Care managers are recognised automatically. Give a staff member the Care Manager or Registered Manager position and the Policies hub appears in their side menu, with a badge showing anything waiting for them. Every approval, and every send-back with its reason, is kept in an approval trail on the policy so you always have a record of who signed off and when.