22 June 2026 · CareTime
Every care home in the UK knows the pattern. The phone rings. A carer stops what they're doing, walks to reception, and picks up. It's someone selling energy contracts, insurance, cleaning supplies, or recruitment services. Thirty seconds later the call is over. But the interruption isn't.
The carer has lost their place. The resident they were helping has been left waiting. The task they were focused on now needs to be picked back up from scratch. Research on workplace interruptions suggests that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus after a disruption — though in a care setting, the impact is more immediate and practical.
Multiply this across a day, a week, a month, and the real cost of nuisance calls becomes clear. It's not the time on the phone. It's the time around the phone.
Ofcom estimates that UK consumers and businesses receive over 4.4 billion nuisance calls and texts per year. Care homes are disproportionately affected for a simple reason: they can't screen calls.
When the phone rings in a care home, it could be a family member with an urgent concern, a GP calling about a resident, a pharmacy confirming medication, or the local authority. It could also be a cold caller. There's no way to tell until someone answers.
In homes CareTime monitors, a typical day brings around 12 inbound calls. On busier days that rises to 17 or more. A meaningful proportion of those calls — spread across the day and early evening — are from callers with no connection to the home or its residents.
This means care homes answer every call. And a significant proportion of those calls are unwanted.
Consumer call blocking tools — the kind you might use on a personal mobile — rely on known spam number databases. They work for the most obvious robocalls, but they're ineffective against the types of nuisance calls that care homes typically receive.
Sales callers to care homes are often real people calling from legitimate business numbers. They're not spoofed numbers or automated diallers. They're recruitment agencies, equipment suppliers, insurance brokers, and service providers who specifically target care homes because they know someone will pick up.
Number-based blocking also carries a risk in care settings. Block the wrong number and you could miss a call from a new GP surgery, a locum pharmacist, or a family member calling from a different phone.
The most common frustrations we hear from care home managers are:
No visibility. Most homes have no idea how many nuisance calls they receive per week. There's no log, no data, and no way to measure the impact. The problem is felt but never quantified.
Staff frustration. Carers who repeatedly answer sales calls become frustrated and, over time, may start letting the phone ring longer — which means genuine calls also wait.
Management time. Registered managers often end up fielding calls themselves because they're the only person available. Every sales call they take is time not spent on leadership, compliance, or resident care.
No good solution. Traditional options are either too blunt (block lists that might catch genuine callers) or too expensive (dedicated reception staff for call handling).
Rather than trying to block calls based on phone numbers, CareTime's Silent Guard monitors every call and delivers a Morning Brief before 9am. That daily email shows your registered manager the full picture: who called, when, what the call was about, and whether anything needs attention.
For the first time, managers can see the shape of their home's call day — not just the sales calls, but the pattern underneath them.
The Brief also surfaces calls that a busy team might miss. Repeat unknown callers. Contacts at unusual times. Short-duration calls that ring and cut off. These are signals that matter — for safeguarding, for CQC evidence, and for understanding how families and clinicians are actually trying to reach you.
In one home, it was the Brief that first revealed a pattern of calls later identified as a financial-abuse attempt targeting a resident. The calls had been arriving across multiple shifts. Nobody had joined the picture until it appeared in a single daily summary. For more on this, see How Care Homes Catch Financial Abuse Attempts Using Call Intelligence.
If you manage a care home and suspect calls are eating into your team's time, the first step is visibility. You can't fix what you can't measure.
CareTime's Silent Guard pilot costs £49 for 30 days. No long-form contract, no hardware, no changes to your phone system. Within a week you'll have real data on your call patterns — and a Morning Brief arriving every morning before the day starts.
CareTime's Silent Guard is available now for a 30-day pilot. £49, 1-page pilot letter — exit by reply-email.
Join the 30-Day Pilot
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