Social care & community services
Where does a person lose continuity when moving between service providers?
The operating journey
Service access, referrals, coordination and participant experience. Examine where information, responsibility and authority meet across this chain.
Trace the institutional condition
Map referral ownership and feedback with minimal necessary data. Eligibility decisions and individual care judgments remain with authorized professionals.
Set the first inquiry
Start with the question: Where does a person lose continuity when moving between service providers? Agree the baseline, owners, information access and review conditions. The output should make the next decision inspectable. Keep the institutional promise, lived experience and operating condition in the same inquiry. Leave the next observation with a named institutional owner.
Start with one consequential journey
A practical starting scope is service referral across care-support teams. Map the promise made to the person using the service, the actual handovers, the authority to resolve an exception and the experience at each step. Review records alongside direct observation and participant accounts. A recurring complaint may reflect a broken process, unclear communication or both; establish which explanation the evidence supports before choosing training or a system change.
An assessment you can reproduce
Candidate measures: referrals accepted by a named owner / eligible referrals; repeated requests for the same information. Agree definitions, observation window and data owners before establishing a baseline. Inspect missing records and differences between teams instead of treating a mean as the whole story. Repeat the same measurement after the agreed intervention and test alternative explanations. These are starting measures to validate with the institution, not universal thresholds or claims of previous delivery.