The incident lifecycle

An incident is rarely finished when you first write it. The picture develops over hours or days, and ARC is built for that: the original stays as written, and everything after it is added on top.

An incident starts as Submitted

The form has one button, Create Incident, and what it creates is already submitted. There is no save-as-draft step to forget.

Your home's managers are notified straight away, by email and in ARC.

Two things move, and they are separate

The running log is the working record — what you saw next, what you did, who you called. Anyone in the home can add to it.

Manager review is the oversight step, and it is a manager's alone. It is tracked separately from the incident's status, so an incident can be reviewed and still be open, or still be waiting on review after everything else is finished.

A manager can also send an incident back to a named member of staff for changes, or undo a review. See Send a record back for changes, or undo a sign-off.

The statuses

The badge at the top of an incident, and the filters on the incidents list, use five states:

Once an incident is Resolved or Closed, Add Update is disabled — the running log stops there.

Adding an update

Select Add Update. Choose a Type — Observation, Intervention, Action or Note — set the Time, and write the Details.

The update is added to the running log with your name and the time, and the incident's AI summary is refreshed in the background.

Updates accumulate. Nothing you have written is overwritten or removed by a later entry, which is what makes the sequence defensible when it is read back months later.

What else hangs off an incident

Depending on what happened, the incident page also carries linked logs, physical interventions, debriefs, follow-up tasks and — where a manager has flagged one — a Regulation 40 notification.

Download PDF compiles the whole thing, including the linked records and the updates that carry a reason, into one document.