The decisions social workers make are often under the spotlight. Increasingly professional decision-making is seen not as a stand-alone single act but a continuum shaped by a range of factors making up a decision ecology. Social work has been described as an invisible trade, and one of its most private and invisible arenas is the home visit.Despite being a long established core activity in social work and an important site for social work judgement and decision-making, the home visit has often been taken for granted, leaving it under-researched and under-theorized. We use a case study of a visit drawn from one of the authors' practice to examine the range of ecological variables that shaped the encounter. The intention is not to produce a generalized prescription for best practice but to provide a detailed exploration of a piece of practice and contribute to the development of practice-based theory about social work decision-making and home visiting. KEYWORDSchild care/statutory agencies work, child protection, family social work, risk in social work