Trial Stays Before You Commit to a SIL Home

Why a tour is not enough

A tour is a house at its best: cleaned that morning, the good staff rostered on, everyone home and settled. It answers what the place looks like. It does not answer what it is like to live there.

A trial stay answers the second question, and it is the single most useful thing a family can arrange before committing. A few nights tells you more than four visits.

Arranging one

Ask directly. Providers vary in what they offer and some will say no, but the question is reasonable and the answer itself is informative.

Sort out three things before the dates are set. How the stay is funded, because a trial is often arranged as short term accommodation rather than out of a SIL line, and that has to be checked against your plan rather than assumed. What the other residents have been told, because arriving unannounced into someone's home is unfair on them. And what happens at the end, so nobody is left thinking a decision has been made when it has not.

Aim for at least two nights and include a weekday. A weekend stay misses the whole rhythm of a working, school-attending, day-program-attending house. Our piece on what a Saturday looks like in a supported home shows how different the two can be.

What to watch while you are there

The handover between shifts. Stay up for one. A good handover is specific and about people. A bad one is two workers talking about the roster while nobody mentions the person who had a difficult afternoon.

How staff talk to residents when nothing is happening. The quality of a home shows in the dead time, not in the activity. Are people spoken to, or spoken about in front of.

The evening. Between dinner and bed is when a house is either a home or a shift. Is there anything to do. Does anyone sit down.

The bathroom and the morning. Whether there is enough time and enough privacy for everyone to get ready without being rushed says more about the roster than any document.

Food. Who decides, who cooks, whether anyone is involved. Our explanation of how a roster of care is built covers why some houses have the staffing for cooking together and some do not.

What to ask before you leave

Ask who would be the regular workers, not just who was on this week. Continuity is the thing families most often discover too late.

Ask what the last resident who left did next, and why. A provider that answers this plainly is telling you something good about itself.

Ask what happens when two residents do not get on, and ask for a real example rather than a policy. Ask how a change in someone's needs is handled, since that is the most common reason a settled house stops being settled.

And ask what they thought. A house that has an honest opinion about whether the fit is right is worth more than one that says yes to everybody.

Afterwards, before deciding

Write it down the same day, while it is specific. Memory smooths a stay into a general impression within a week, and general impressions are exactly what you do not want to decide on.

Separate three things: what was genuinely wrong, what was only unfamiliar, and what could be fixed by asking. Plenty of first-stay discomfort is the second category, and some of the third is solved by a sentence in a support plan.

Then talk to the person who would live there, on their own, away from the house and away from the provider. Their view is the one that matters most and the one most easily talked over.

If it is a yes, get the specifics into the service agreement rather than leaving them as understandings. Our checklist of questions to ask a SIL provider before you sign covers what belongs in writing.

If a trial is not possible

Some homes cannot host one, and a full house with settled residents has a fair reason. Ask for the nearest equivalent instead: a shared dinner, an evening visit rather than an afternoon one, a second visit on a different weekday.

The point is not the bed. It is seeing the house when it is not expecting to be looked at.