Patient requests and clinical events reach staff as Tasks in Vital Care Team. Two separate settings govern them: which requests patients can raise at all, and which of those notify a given staff member. Most confusion about alerts comes from mistaking one for the other.

Earlier versions of Care Team called this the Alerts tab.

Select Tasks in the left sidebar, or in the bottom navigation bar on a phone. The Tasks queue lists every active request with the patient, task type, location, assignee and status. Staff can also raise a request on a patient's behalf from the Make Request tab in the visit sidebar. See Working the Tasks Queue in Care Team.

The Location filter on this page changes only what appears in the queue. It does not change which requests send a notification. This is the single most common misunderstanding: filtering the queue to one unit does not stop alerts from another. A small number of facilities remain on an earlier version of this page, where the Location and Group pickers do change subscriptions. If changing a picker here appears to change which alerts arrive, that facility is on the earlier behaviour.

Notifications are set per staff member, not per device. Open Settings › Notifications to set a master switch, a per-facility toggle, the locations covered, and the task types wanted.

A request notifies a staff member only when it matches both a selected location and a selected task type. Either one missing means silence, which is why an account with every task type selected and no location still receives nothing.

Settings › Availability controls when patients can raise each task type at each location. Every task type runs in one of three modes.

A task type in Staffing or Staffing & Scheduled mode is Unavailable to patients when no staff member is subscribed to that location, even inside operating hours. The Availability page flags these as missing staff coverage.

A task type marked Unavailable because no staff are subscribed to that location

This links the two settings in one direction: for staffing modes, turning notifications off can remove the request from patients entirely. Scheduled mode does not behave this way, because its hours hold regardless of who is subscribed.

The Team page lists every team member's notification status, task types and locations, so a gap is visible before a shift rather than after a missed request. It requires a Management or Notification Admin role. See Team Page in Care Team.

Requests keep arriving from a unit that is not selected. Why?

The Location filter on the Tasks page is a view filter only. Check the locations selected under the facility in Settings › Notifications, and remove the unit there. That list, not the queue filter, decides what sends an alert.

Do notifications need setting up separately on desktop and mobile?

No. Preferences belong to the account, so they apply on every device signed in to it. A session can be open on a computer and a phone at once, and both follow the same settings.

Can alerts be scheduled to stop overnight and resume in the morning?

Yes, through Settings › Availability rather than through notification settings. A task type in Scheduled or Staffing & Scheduled mode is live only during its operating hours. Notification settings themselves have no schedule and stay as set until changed.

A staff member left without signing out and is still receiving requests. What stops that?

A session stays active until it is signed out, the browser is closed, or the device restarts, and signing out on one device does not end a session on another. Notifications follow the account, so removing the location or turning the facility toggle off in Settings › Notifications stops the alerts regardless of which device is open.