Your child's care should never depend on chance.

The hours immediately after

Most continuity planning imagines a distant future — a will read, an estate settled, a guardian formally appointed. But the part that decides how your child actually experiences a crisis is much shorter and much sooner: the hours immediately after something happens to you.

In those hours, nobody is reading legal documents. Someone is trying to work out what your child eats, which medication is due, why they are distressed — for an autistic child this can mean the specific sensory trigger or routine only you would know — and who to telephone. If that information exists only in your head, the people trying to help are working blind at the worst possible moment.

How activation works

• Trusted coordinators

  You nominate the people who could raise an emergency. More than one of them has to verify it — the plan does not open on a single say-so.

• The right care

  The right information reaches the right caregiver: what they need to look after your child properly, without exposing everything else.

• Ready when needed

  The plan is prepared in advance and waiting. Nothing has to be assembled while people are in shock.

What the people stepping in receive

Enough to care for your child competently from the first hour — the practical knowledge that usually never leaves the primary carer:

• Daily routine, sleep patterns and the rituals that settle your child
• Food preferences, textures and what must be avoided
• Current medications, dosage and schedule
• How your child communicates need, pain and distress
• Comfort items — the specific toy, blanket or music that helps
• Who to contact: doctors, therapists, family, and in what order

Set it up once, keep it current

The plan takes an evening to establish and a few minutes to revise when something changes. It is the part of the whole plan most likely to be needed, and the part most families have not written down at all.