Plait supports "phases" of employment, which are configured on the Employment Reqs tab of the Organisation form.  Every organisation must have an In Post phase, and there are two optional phases: Probation and Induction.  A care worker is then assigned to the appropriate phase by setting the correct value in the Employment Status field on the Employment tab of the care worker record.  This field can only be changed if the carer satisfies the requirements of the phase they are being put into, and a graphic to the right of the field will highlight any unmet requirements or show that all the requirements for a phase have been met.


If the Induction phase is enabled then a further field appears on the Employment Reqs tab:

This allows you to add inductees to bookings that they are going to shadow, which has many advantages over setting up shadowing as a non contact event type or handling shadowing :

  1. Pay rates for time at bookings and time spent travelling will be handled properly.
  2. The system will have a record of which service users the inductee has had an introduction to.
  3. A record is kept of what tasks / medications etc have been shadowed.


Note: the client may be charged for the shadowing care worker if the care worker is not assigned to a specific grade which does not attract charges.


If your tariff charge lines are set to <any> in the grade group (for example see below), the charge rate will apply for both the inductee and the care worker being shadowed.



To not attract charges for the inductee, they should be added to a different carer grade/group and the tariff lines assigned the grade groups where the charges should apply.  This may mean lines for every other grade group need to be entered.  For example, if our organisation has 3 grades, Induction, CSW and Senior CSW, the tariff lines would be as below:



At the end of the induction phase a new contract should be created to move the care worker to a chargeable grade.  


Using grades in this way means it is also possible for the care worker to have multiple live contracts, one for shadowing (and not chargeable) and one for main work.  This configuration could be used if you have care workers shadow clients that are new to them, even if they have been with the organisation past their induction phase.