FAR cover, and what happens when someone calls in sick

A staff member trained in First Aid Response needs to be available to children at all times the service operates — through breaks, leave, and roster changes, not just during a "normal" shift. Tusla's inspection notebook checks this specifically, including whether the certificate itself is still in date, which makes FAR cover a rostering problem as much as a training one.

The staff-absence policy has to answer the same question from the other direction: what happens, concretely, when someone doesn't show up. Planned and unplanned absence, notification, return-to-work, and — the part that actually protects ratio and FAR cover — how a substitute gets found and what that substitute needs to already have on file before they're allowed to step in. A replacement who isn't vetted, competent, and qualified for the duties they're covering isn't cover, it's a second problem stacked on the first.

Training and supervision records need to show the same thing training certificates alone can't: that training addressed something the service actually needed, not a generic list of attendance certificates with no visible effect on practice.

Bloomffy's relief-cover picker exists for the rostering half of this specifically — when someone needs to step into a room they're not normally assigned to, any active, appropriately-credentialed staff member at the crèche can be tapped into that room's presence log directly, which is what actually keeps the ratio math honest during an unplanned absence rather than a free-text note that never gets checked against anything. The training-records expiry tracking (induction is one-time, First Aid and child-protection certs aren't) is the other half — a FAR certificate is only useful if someone notices it's about to lapse before the day it actually does.