A weekly board is a single grid that shows every hour of the week, who covers it, and what happens when that person is not available. Building it before the first visit puts the handoff on paper, so the family and the agency work from the same picture. It is built in a fixed order so that no part of the week is left blank by accident.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
Step one: draw the grid
Rule a sheet or a whiteboard into seven day columns and time rows, running from the earliest hour a visit could start to the latest hour one could end. Make the rows tall enough to write a name and a short task. Mark the hours the family covers, the hours the agency covers, and the hours no one covers yet.
Step two: fill the scheduled visits
Write each agreed visit in its own block with the start window, the end window, and the task list in short words. Use the task names from the signed care plan. List the tasks in the order the aide will do them. A block with no task named is a block that will be argued over later.
Step three: name the owner of each gap
For each empty hour, write who covers it: a family member, the agency's backup aide, or a named friend. If the answer is nobody, write nobody. A grid with visible blanks is more useful than one that only looks full. The blanks become the questions to take back to the agency.
Step four: post it and set the update rule
Post the board where the aide and the family both see it, usually near the door or the phone. Set a rule for who may change it, who must be told when a change is made, and when the whole board is redrawn. Mark each version with the day it changed. Keep the previous version for a month so that a missed visit can be checked against what was on the board at the time.