Self-managed is a style of care and support delivery for clients who want to manage their care and support themselves. Lookout's self-managed features allow clients to completely manage their own support from signup to negotiating rates and visits with support workers and booking in services.

Choice and control are essential for people who wish to self-manage – but it’s vital to offer this experience without compromising on values of high-quality care. Matching support workers to clients is an important aspect of quality service delivery. In our research, families regularly tell us about the confidence and reassurance they feel from having the same trusted people in their homes. Support workers also tell us how much this improves their experience and ability to provide help and support.

This article will show you how these features work and how to use them.

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Clients (both members and their nominated representatives) can signup for the self-managed offering through custom signup API integration with Lookout. Their details are saved into Lookout, and the system can open an optional ticket to alert administration staff.

To allow Clients access to the self-managed features, they need to be on a Membership Plan that allows them to make requests for services.

Once the client completes the signup form, they can activate their account and describe their preferred support worker match. These steps include defining the services they want, the days they prefer, details about themselves, and matching preferences for things like hobbies, skills, and interests. This assists the Lookout matching engine to recommend a tightly curated list of potential support worker matches.

Administration staff can view the request details sent by the client and preview the support worker candidates that the system will send to the client. Administration staff can also manually send the candidates earlier than the standard 24 hours if they prefer. They can also view the conversation between the support worker and the client.

Clients will receive a notification alerting them to new candidates for their match request. They can then review each candidate and indicate if they would like to send their request to the candidate. At this point, the candidate's details are hidden from clients until the support worker accepts the request. This is done to reduce unconscious bias in the selection processes and protect support workers from unwanted communication until they are ready to engage with a new client.

The support worker will receive a notification about the new request and choose to engage with the client. If a support worker decides to connect, they will be empowered to communicate directly with the client to discuss the opportunity, negotiate services plus rates and propose the first visit.

When the client and support worker are ready, the support worker can propose the first visit. The client will need to accept before the service can occur. This proposal can be adjusted as many times as is necessary before the client accepts.

Once the client has accepted the proposal from the support worker, a visit will appear in the Lookout support worker and client app schedule and the Lookout Admin schedule.

At any time before the visit, a client can request a change to the visit. If the visit is in the next 24 hours, a warning is presented to the client, letting them know it may be too late to adjust the visit without incurring costs. Request changes to a visit are coordinated through the client/support worker chat thread. The support worker can edit or reschedule the visit, which is sent to the client as a new proposal. Once accepted by the client, the visit is adjusted in their schedule.

At any point, after the first visit is accepted, the support worker can make additional visits proposals. Each of these will come through to the client as a notification. The client must accept each before they will appear in the schedule.