Seven nights a week: building a night rota

The tool warns you when one carer is on more than 4 nights because that is the point at which rotas start failing. A carer will say yes to five or six nights when they need the work, and six weeks later they are cancelling on a Tuesday because they have not had two nights in a row at home. Spreading a full week across two or three people costs slightly more, because each of them prices their own nights, and it is the difference between an arrangement that lasts a year and one that collapses in a month.

Night work is unusual among care jobs because it inverts the person's whole week. A carer doing three nights sleeps in the day on those days and lives normally on the others. A carer doing six is nocturnal, and carers living that way become ill and short-tempered, and eventually stop taking the work. Agencies solve this with a pool of staff and a rota nobody sees, which is why an agency can promise seven nights but not the same face. Booking carers directly means you see the constraint, and you get to decide who is in the house.

The weekend is the other thing nobody warns you about. Friday and Saturday nights are the hardest to fill and the first to be cancelled, because carers have families too. If your relative needs seven nights, fill Friday and Saturday first and build the rest of the week around whoever will do them.

1. 1

   Decide which nights are non-negotiable

   Start here

   Not every night is equally bad. For many families it is the nights before a working day, or the nights the family carer is on their own. Write those down first, and be straight with yourself about which nights somebody at home can still manage.
2. 2

   Fix each carer to the same nights every week

   The key step

   Carer A on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Carer B on Thursday and Friday. Carer C on the weekend. Fixed nights mean everybody can plan their own life around them, which is why they get kept. Rotas that change week to week fall apart by the third week.
3. 3

   Set the kind of night per night, not for the whole week

   Saves money

   Some households have a pattern: bad nights after a day out, quiet nights at the weekend. If three nights of the week really need somebody awake and four do not, book them that way. Over a month that difference pays for another night.
4. 4

   Write one care plan, not three

   One page

   Every carer on the rota works from the same page: medication, what to do if she is up, who to ring, what settles her. Keep one notebook in the kitchen that all of them write in, because the third carer needs to know what the first one noticed.
5. 5

   Agree the cover rule before you need it

   Week one

   Decide what happens when somebody is ill. Usually it is: message the group, the other carers get first refusal, and if nobody can take it the family covers or we help you find someone. Settling that in advance means an illness does not turn into a crisis.

A month is not four weeks, which is where budgets go wrong. There are 52 weeks in the year, so a month is 4.33 weeks. Seven sleeping nights a week is £910 to £1,015 a week and about £3,943 to £4,398 a month. Over a year that is £47,320 to £52,780. Seven waking nights is £4,550 to £4,853 a month.

Set that against what the days still cost. Most people who need somebody every night also need help in the morning and at teatime, so the household bill is the nights plus fifteen or twenty hours a week of visits. That is the sum that pushes families towards live-in care, and the cost of care hub puts all three side by side.

The fair comparison is not seven nights against live-in care. It is seven nights plus the daytime visits against live-in care, and on that basis live-in is usually cheaper. What stops families is usually not the money. It is the spare room, and the idea of somebody living in the house. Both are real, and both are smaller than they look from the outside. Where live-in carers sleep covers the room, and is live-in care seven days a week covers how one carer can cover a whole week when a night carer cannot.

There are also good reasons to stay with nights. If the days are fine, if your relative is fiercely independent and would refuse a live-in carer, or if this is a temporary stretch after a hospital stay, a rota of nights is the right answer even at seven of them. Overnight care or a care home covers the harder version of this decision.

The pattern that works best for most families is a run rather than a scatter: the carer does Sunday to Wednesday, the family does Thursday to Saturday, or the other way round. Sleep debt is cumulative and it does not clear in a single good night, so four consecutive nights of proper sleep does far more for a family carer than four scattered ones. If the reason you are reading this is that you are the one getting up, overnight care so the family carer can sleep is written for exactly that, and respite care covers the longer breaks.