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directly, alongside the rest of what makes a staff file complete, not as a separate org chart document that can drift out of date, but as a fact attached to the actual person's record.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.