Placements Taking Months? Here's Where They Stall

Some of the three to six month placement timeline is necessary. It takes time to approve plans, families need time, existing residents need time and it would be wrong to rush a decision on where someone will live.

But a certain portion of it is two or three places where nothing happens for two weeks for no reason. These are the weeks that you can give back to the person waiting.

If you only change three things:

• Quick response by one named person.  The majority of momentum is gained or lost here.
• Name a quote turnaround and send a holding note if it slips.  Silence during quoting reads as lost interest.
• Stay in weekly contact during the wait before move-in.  Placements are lost here more frequently than people realise.

The rest of this walks through each step and what keeps it moving. At the end, we will examine your previous 20 enquiries and let you know where yours are stalling.

The Journey, Stage By Stage

Stage 1, The Enquiry Is Received

A coordinator, family member, LAC or participant contacts. Usually via phone, sometimes by email, sometimes with a website form that nobody checks daily.

The most prevalent issue is invisible: enquiries arriving through three different channels to four different people, and no one has a single picture of what has come in. Sometimes providers who are certain they have a referral shortage find that they had plenty of enquiries and no system for holding them.

Worth doing: one named owner and one place where everything lands. A shared inbox will suffice.

Stage 2, The Response

Here lies the point of most success or failure. Typically, a coordinator will phone multiple providers at the same time and the discussion will revolve around the one provider who responds quickly and with something useful.

A quick reply matters more than a perfect one. And a reply that says “nothing available right now, but there's a room opening in October, would you like me to hold her details?” keeps you in the picture in a way that silence never does.

Worth doing: a standard first response, covering current availability with a date, a general description of the household, support model, registration status, and a named person with a direct number. One email that responds to the question, instead of requiring them to call you.

Stage 3, Information Exchange

You need enough information about the participant to determine if the household would suit them. They need enough about the home so they can evaluate it from the other side.

This stage is halted when the request is too large. A 15 page intake pack sent to a busy coordinator comes back slowly or not at all.

Worth doing: a short structured form, six or seven fields covering the things that really help determine fit, rather than everything you'll end up needing. The rest can come later, once there is a real chance.

Stage 4, Meet And Greet

Visits, ideally more than one, at various times of the day. Existing residents consulted and engaged in an appropriate manner.

This is where calendars eat weeks. Aligning a coordinator, family, your house manager and the current residents can take a fortnight before anyone has done anything wrong.

Worth doing: offer specific times rather than asking for availability. Hold two standing visiting slots a week so there's always something to offer. Discuss with your residents ahead of time how visits will operate, so each visit isn't a new negotiation.

Stage 5, Quote And Roster Of Care

The SIL quote and roster of care work is detailed and occurs completely at your end. On the surface it appears that nothing is going on. This is the stage where providers most often go quiet, and where coordinators most often assume interest has cooled.

Worth doing: name a turnaround at the start, “we'll have the quote to you within five business days”, and if it slips, send a short holding note. The update takes just a minute and prevents a fortnight of uncertainty.

Stage 6, The Wait Before Move-In

Plan approval, transition planning, sometimes a plan review to get through. Weeks pass with nothing to do.

More placements are lost here than people realise. Not because anything went wrong, but because a family sitting in silence begins to think about other choices.

Worth doing: do something small every week. Photos of the room. An introduction to the house manager. A note on household activities that weekend.

📌  Presence during the wait is what holds the placement together.

Four Numbers Worth Knowing

There is no need to have a system for this. Four columns on a spreadsheet will tell you more than a quarter of guessing!

Enquiries received, by source.  Within a quarter you'll know which sources produce actual move-ins.

Median time to first response.  Median rather than average, one forgotten enquiry sitting for 3 weeks distorts an average and hides an otherwise excellent process.

How far each enquiry got.  The stage with the steepest drop-off is where your attention needs to go.

Days from room available to move-in.  The number to watch over time.

Two things come out of this consistently. The first is that it's typically not the volume of enquiries that is the constraint. The second is that a small number of relationships tend to produce most successful placements, while broader listings generate enquiries that rarely convert, so it is useful to know where to invest effort.

We'll take a look at yours

📊  Please submit your last 20 enquiries and we'll send you a simple summary: where they are getting hung up, what your regular response time actually is, and which sources are quietly producing your move-ins. Free and of course, no strings attached!

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