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The House

Who Has Them Tonight

FamCheck: a shared calendar built for the handover, not the argument

The Editors ·

Who Has Them Tonight

A Miami household rarely runs on one adult. A housekeeper three mornings a week, a grandmother on Sundays, a sitter on Thursday, a co-parent every other weekend, a night nurse for a parent upstairs. The architecture of care in a large home is a rotation, and the dangerous moment in any rotation is not the work. It is the handover.

AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving found this year that 63 million American adults now provide unpaid care, and that 53 percent of them have unpaid help from somebody else. Half of American caregiving is already a rotation. The same report found that technology for watching someone remotely, cameras and wearables and check-in apps, nearly doubled in five years. Technology for coordinating between the humans moved from 17 percent to 19.

We have built a great deal of surveillance for the home and almost nothing for the shift change.

What it is

FamCheck is a shared calendar for households where more than one adult looks after someone. A parent or a principal writes the routine down once: bedtime, the medicine and its exact hour, the allergy, the emergency contact, the thing that always gets forgotten. That record is then handed to whoever is on duty through a single link.

The link is the whole design. The person receiving it makes no account, installs no application, and sets no password. A grandmother, a sitter, a new housekeeper opens a web page and sees this evening, in order, with the medicine at the top.

The part that matters in a multilingual city

The handover reads in six languages: English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Mandarin and Russian. In a city where the person holding a child's inhaler at seven in the evening may not read English, that is not a feature list item. It is the difference between a schedule and an instruction that can be followed.

What it costs, and what it does not do

Pricing is a flat 9.99 dollars a month for an entire household rather than per adult, which is the pricing model most of this category uses. Two of its tools are free permanently with no sign-up at all.

It is also worth saying what it is not. It is a web service, not a native app, so there is no icon on a home screen. It is new, and it does not carry the two decades of court familiarity that the established custody platforms trade on, though it does export a signed record that a third party can verify independently.

The useful thing

Whether or not you use any product for it, write the handover down once, in a form the next adult can read without you in the room, and put the four things that actually cause incidents at the top: the medication and its time, the allergy, who to call, and the thing that always gets forgotten.

Then check the one gate almost nobody checks. For school or daycare collection, absent a court order on file, a custodial and a non-custodial parent generally have equal right to collect a child, and any third party needs written authorisation plus photo identification for staff who do not know them. A same-day substitute only works if that person is already on the authorised list, or the school will accept written permission before dismissal. Arranging that at four on a Thursday afternoon is not a plan.

Medicine wrote this lesson down a long time ago. In May 2007 the World Health Organization published its nine patient safety solutions, and the third is not about surgery or medication. It is communication during patient hand-overs. Standardise the format. Leave time for questions. Read it back.

A house with staff and a house with a grandmother have the same structure. Neither has the protocol.

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