The Family Integrator's Handbook

Every organization involved in someone's care is built to solve one bounded problem. A doctor's office keeps a patient panel seen. An agency puts a trained person in a house on a schedule. An attorney answers who is allowed to decide what. Each of them is good at its job, and each of them stops.

What is left over when all of them have stopped is the part nobody was assigned. Whether the medication list is right. Whether the substitute knows about three o'clock. Whether recovery is actually happening. Whether the person at the center of all this is having a good life, most days, inside whatever they are now living with.

That leftover part does not have a name. It has a person. Usually whoever was closest, showing up the most, noticing first.

This is the working half of The Invisible Architecture, gathered into one book you can write in. Over forty worksheets and tools, in nine sections, built for the moment you need them.

A next-of-kin box a paramedic can find. A medication list that survives four prescribers. The questions to ask an agency before you hire anyone. A page for dividing the work with a column for the jobs nobody claimed. A walkthrough for the day someone comes home from the hospital. A page for when they ask to go home and they are home.

Eleven worksheets name the specific decision that needs an attorney, so a family knows when to stop filling in a form and make a call.

Nothing here has to be done in order. A Start Here If page maps thirteen situations to the pages that fit, so a reader can open the book at eleven at night and find the right one. The pages families use week after week appear several times.

Written by the founder of a care coordination and skilled nursing company serving more than two hundred and fifty families. Every worksheet may be photocopied freely for personal and family use, and by professionals for the families they serve.

Stands alone. Reading The Invisible Architecture first is not required.