Mobile therapy is the model for most NDIS, paediatric, and community allied health work in Australia. It's also where the unmodelled costs hide. Fuel sits beside it, but the bigger one is unbilled minutes — the 14-minute drive to a 60-minute visit, the 40-minute round trip when a client cancels, the half-hour sandwich-and-laptop break in a parked car between two suburbs. Add it up across a year and a fortnightly bowser bill becomes a small fraction of what travel actually costs you.
The shape of the problem
Most itinerant therapists we've spoken to don't have a travel problem in any single day. They have a travel problem across the week. Tuesdays are tight; Thursdays are sprawling. That's because the schedule grew client-by-client over months — each booked at the time that suited the family — and was never re-pruned with geography in mind. The gaps and the gridiron are emergent, not chosen.
Anchor visits and clusters
The pattern that costs the least kilometres is anchored: pick one or two large clusters in your patch, build the day out from the centre, and let the schedule pull you back when you stray. Visits that fall outside the anchor cost you double — there and back. Two visits in the same suburb, even an hour apart, cost roughly one round trip plus a coffee.
Practical tactic: when you're admitting a new client, look at your existing geographic distribution before you pick the slot. A new visit slotted into the 'thin' day in the 'thin' suburb is much more expensive than the same client booked into a Tuesday afternoon you already cluster around.
Reschedule cancellations into the gaps
- When a visit cancels, look at what you can move into that hour from a thin day later in the week — bring the geographic neighbour forward.
- Don't just leave the gap as ad-hoc admin time. Admin can be done anywhere; the cancellation slot is a precise geographic opportunity.
- Make it a Monday-morning ritual: spend 5 minutes redistributing the week before the week starts.
How Carelyt helps with the geography
The Map view shows your week's visits laid over a map of your patch — coloured by therapist if you're a team. The clustering is visible immediately; so are the lonely outliers. My Day puts each day's visits in route order from your home base. Recurring sessions let you set a weekly pattern once and adjust at the edges, instead of rebuilding the schedule each week.
We don't ship a route optimiser yet — we don't think you'd want one. Optimisers tend to flatten the small human reasons schedules look the way they do (a child's nap window, a parent's school run, a clinic accessibility need). What we do show is honest geography, so the human doing the scheduling can see what they're doing.
The wider win
The teams that get the most out of geographic thinking aren't the ones who chase the cheapest single trip — they're the ones who replace 'wherever a slot is free' with 'wherever a slot is free AND geographically sensible'. The fuel saving is real; the bigger win is the time + energy you don't burn driving in the wrong direction.