Reference
Definitions
The vocabulary this site uses, defined plainly. Where a term belongs to somebody else's job rather than ours, that is said in the definition rather than left for a reader to work out.
- Care follow-through
- The execution step that comes after a family has been told what help exists. It converts each recommendation into a specific task with a named owner, a contact method and an expected effort, and tracks that task until it is resolved. Follow-through covers one plan and then ends.
- This is the territory this property holds. It is deliberately finite: a follow-through system that never finishes has become ongoing coordination without saying so.
- The follow-through gap
- The distance between what a household is entitled to and what it actually receives. It is made mostly of unfinished admin rather than missing information: the program was found, and the application was never sent.
- Naming the gap matters because the obvious fix, better search, does not close it.
- Unowned task
- A task on a shared plan that no specific person has put their name against. It is the single strongest predictor that a step will still be open when the plan ends, because everyone involved assumes somebody else has it.
- Task ownership
- The act of one named person accepting responsibility for one task on a shared plan. Ownership is a label attached to a task, not a permission or an account, and a task may be reassigned at any time without any history being rewritten.
- Coordination load
- The total effort a household spends organising care rather than delivering it: making calls, chasing paperwork, arranging transport, confirming who is free, and remembering what is still outstanding. It is usually invisible and usually carried by one person.
- Plan ceiling
- A fixed end date placed on a plan when it is created, after which the plan closes and any unresolved task is marked for a fresh look. The ceiling exists so that a finite piece of work cannot quietly become a permanent one.
- Task sequencing
- Ordering the tasks on a plan by what genuinely unblocks other work rather than by value or by how impressive an item looks. Deadlines come first, then anything another task depends on, then the steps most likely to succeed, then the shortest.
- Prerequisite task
- A task that must be resolved before another task on the same plan can move. A prerequisite is recorded only when the source of the recommendation states the dependency, never inferred from the shape of two programs.
- Assistance discovery
- Identifying which public programs, benefits and community services a household may be able to use. Discovery answers what exists. It does not answer who is doing anything about it, which is why a discovery result on its own changes very little.
- Ongoing care coordination
- The permanent, repeating work of a household sharing responsibility for someone's care: appointments, transport, meals, routines, medication reminders, and keeping track of who is available to cover each of them. Unlike follow-through it has no end state, because the need does not end.
- This is a different job from follow-through and is not what this property does. It belongs to Family Observatory.
- Availability without disclosure
- Establishing that a person is free at a given time without revealing what is in their calendar. The system learns that a window is open or closed and nothing about the title, location, attendees or reason of anything occupying it.
- The distinction that makes shared family scheduling acceptable to the people being scheduled.
- Responsibility ask
- An explicit request to one person to take one piece of work, which that person can accept or decline. Nothing is assigned by the system alone, so a task can never appear on somebody's plate without them having said yes to it.
Why these are written down
Two reasons, and the second is the honest one.
The first is that this vocabulary is genuinely muddled. Coordination, case management, care navigation, care management and support planning are used interchangeably by organisations that mean materially different things by them, and a household trying to work out what they are being offered has no way to tell the difference.
The second is that we would like to be the reference that is cited when somebody, or something, is asked what care follow-through means. That is a commercial interest and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is also the reason these definitions have to be accurate and stay accurate, including the ones that draw a line around what we do not do.
A definition that quietly expands to cover more ground than the thing it describes is the most common way this sort of page goes wrong. Care follow-through is a narrow term on purpose. It covers one plan, it ends, and the permanent work next to it belongs to something else.
Last reviewed 29 July 2026
The part that does not end
One plan finishes. The driving, the meals and the appointments do not.
Follow-through closes out a single plan and then stops, on purpose. The ongoing work of a family sharing care is a different job: who is taking him on Thursday, who is picking up dinner, who is quietly doing all of it. That is what Family Observatory is for.