Care Follow-Through
A list of recommendations is not a plan.
Most families are handed a list. A list is a description of a destination. Care Follow-Through is the six things a step needs before somebody can actually do it on a Tuesday.
What a list gives you and what it withholds
A good recommendation list is real work and genuinely valuable. It tells you that In-Home Supportive Services exists, that the county has a veterans service office, that a meal programme covers your area. None of that was knowable an hour earlier.
What it does not tell you is what to do first, who is doing it, what you need in your hand before you ring, how long it takes, or what happens to the other ten items while you work on this one. Those are not details. They are the entire difference between information and action.
The six parts of a step
One. A verb. Not "IHSS", which is a programme. "Call the county IHSS office and ask to start an application." A noun is a topic. A verb is something a person can do.
Two. An owner. One name. Not the family, not everybody, and not the system's guess.
Three. What you need before you start. The document, the number, the information that will be asked for. Discovering halfway through a call that you need something you do not have is how a step becomes two steps and a fortnight.
Four. A realistic size. Fifteen minutes or six weeks. People schedule fifteen minute things into the gaps they actually have. A step with no size is assumed to be large and postponed accordingly.
Five. A state. Not started, waiting on someone else, blocked, done. Without this nobody can answer where things stand, and the states have to be distinct or they collapse into a vague sense of ongoing.
Six. What it unblocks. Some steps are prerequisites and some are independent. A family working alphabetically through a list will hit the thing that needed the other thing, and read that as the plan not working rather than as a question of order.
And then only a few at once
A complete plan of eleven properly specified steps is still the thing nobody starts. Three at a time is not a simplification of the plan. It is a recognition that a plan nobody begins has a completion rate of zero, whatever its quality.
Why the list stays whole underneath
Showing three does not mean discarding eight. The full set stays visible and stays theirs, because a family deciding what matters most is making a judgement about their own life that nothing else is qualified to make for them. Sequencing is a suggestion about order, never a filter on what exists.
This is also why the plan a family receives from an assessment is never edited down. It is complete when they get it, it stays complete, and follow-through is layered on top rather than substituted for it.
The test
Read a step out loud and ask whether a specific person could begin it in the next ten minutes without asking anybody a question first. If yes, it is a step. If no, it is still a recommendation wearing the grammar of one, and the missing piece is almost always the owner or the prerequisite.
Family Observatory is where a plan gets these six parts attached to it and keeps them as the weeks pass.
Related: how follow-through works and how to tell a plan has stalled.