The person in charge, and the deputy who actually covers

There has to be a clearly designated person in charge, and clearly designated deputy arrangements, for every hour the service is operating — not just during the manager's own working day. Tusla's inspection notebook checks whether the person in charge or a deputy is actually on the premises, not whether one is named somewhere in a folder.

A deputy on paper who's never actually run a safeguarding escalation, handled an incident, or made a staffing call under pressure isn't cover, it's a name. The deputy needs defined authority and needs to know how to act on it, which is a different bar than knowing the job title exists.

The same logic applies to the wider management structure. A small service with an informal "everyone just knows who's in charge" culture still needs a written structure — role descriptions, an org chart, an escalation path — because informality doesn't survive an inspector, a serious incident, or a staff member who's new enough not to already know the unwritten rules.

This is one of the smaller, less glamorous fields in Bloomffy's staff records, but it's a real one: staff-credential records track who's flagged PIC and who's flagged DPIC directly, alongside the rest of what makes a staff file complete — not as a separate org chart document that can drift out of date, but as a fact attached to the actual person's record. It doesn't replace a written management structure; it just means the answer to "who's the deputy today" doesn't depend on someone remembering correctly.