Care Follow-Through
Nothing announces that a plan has stopped.
A stalled plan and a plan that is simply waiting look identical from outside. Care Follow-Through is the practice of telling them apart early, because the cost of the difference compounds weekly.
Why it is invisible
Most of the steps in a care plan legitimately involve waiting. An application is being processed. A callback is expected. An assessment is scheduled for the nineteenth. During all of that, correct behaviour is to do nothing, which is indistinguishable from having forgotten.
So a family cannot tell, from how it feels, whether they are patient or stuck. Both feel the same, and both feel faintly guilty. The question needs an answer from somewhere other than intuition.
The five signals
One. Nothing changed state. Not that nothing happened, which is normal, but that nothing moved from one state to another for longer than the step's own natural rhythm. A fortnight of silence on a callback promised within three days is a different fact from a fortnight into an eight week assessment queue.
Two. Nobody owns the next step. The commonest and most fixable one. Work that nobody has taken on does not progress, and a plan where the next step is unowned has already stopped, whatever else is still in flight.
Three. The reason for waiting has expired. The family is waiting for a callback that was promised three weeks ago. They are not waiting any more. They are hoping, and the correct move changed some time ago from patience to a second call.
Four. A prerequisite is quietly unmet. Three tasks are all waiting on a document nobody obtained. The three look active. They are all blocked by the same thing, and nobody is looking at the thing.
Five. The same question keeps being asked. If somebody in the family asks where things stand more than once and gets a different answer each time, nobody holds the state. That is a stall regardless of what the list says.
Waiting is not stalling, and the distinction is the whole point
A system that flagged every quiet week would flag every plan, constantly, and a family that gets alarmed at correctly would stop reading alarms. Then the real one arrives and goes unread. Sensitivity that costs trust is worse than no sensitivity at all, because it removes the ability to say something that matters.
What the honest response is
To name the specific thing and nothing more. Not that the family is behind, not a score, not a nudge that reads as nagging from software about somebody's mother. Simply: this step has not moved and here is what it was waiting for.
A plan that has genuinely stopped usually needs one of three things, and naming the signal makes clear which: a person to take the next step on, a second call to somebody who did not ring back, or an acknowledgement that this route is not going to work and something else should be tried. All three are actions a family can take. None of them are available while the stall is invisible.
Stalling is normal
Nearly every care plan stalls somewhere. The agencies are slow, the forms are long, people have jobs, and the person at the centre of it has good weeks and bad ones. A plan that stalled and restarted is an ordinary plan. A plan that stalled and was never noticed is the one that quietly becomes a crisis nine months later, and the difference between the two is entirely a matter of whether anybody could see it.
Family Observatory is where these signals are actually watched for, so a stall is noticed by something other than a family's memory.
Related: the five ways a plan stops moving and what each task state means.