How we write this desk

Who publishes it

Mom Keeps Falling is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis company that builds and runs small reference sites. The pages carry a desk byline, not a person's name, because nobody on the desk is a clinician and the site does not want a face standing in for a source. There is no doctor, nurse or therapist here. That is the reason every page sends questions about her health back to the people who treat her.

One reader, one question per page

Each article is written for a single moment: a daughter whose mother has fallen more than once, mostly at night, on the way to the bathroom. Each page takes one question she actually types, answers it in the order she needs it, and stops where the doctor's part begins. The voice is meant for someone reading in the dark, which is why the pages open with what to do and put the explanation after.

How a fact gets onto a page

• It links in the sentence. Every factual claim is linked, where it is made, to a public source: federal health agencies such as the National Institute on Aging, the CDC and Medicare.gov, Missouri state departments, the St. Louis area agencies on aging, major nonprofits such as Family Caregiver Alliance, and the public websites of the local fire protection districts.
• Numbers stay in the source's words. A statistic keeps the source's own figure and year. The desk does not round, combine or restate a number into something more dramatic.
• Phone numbers are read, not remembered. A local number is printed only after it has been read on the agency's own page, and the page says the date it was read. The local help directory links every entry to that page.
• Silence is reported as silence. Where public sources say nothing, for example about what a fire district sends for a lift assist, which bed rail is safe, or what overnight care costs, the page says so instead of guessing.
• Everything is listed. The sources page lists each linked page with what it was used for and the date it was checked.

The one paid placement

There is exactly one advertiser on this site: New Plan Care Solutions, a non-medical in-home care company independently owned and operated in St. Louis by Stacie Postol. It is a client of OwnersFirm, the publisher, and it pays for its placement. The two companies are not commonly owned.

The placement is labelled every time it appears: a box on the front page, a short box after each article, and a marked entry in the local directory. The only form on the site sits inside that front-page box and goes to New Plan Care Solutions, which contacts people only in the way they ask. The paid placement is never a ranking, a score or a verdict drawn from anything on the desk, and it did not choose or review the articles or the sources.

What this site will not do

• Diagnose, or say why she is falling. That is her doctor's work.
• Give advice about medicines beyond one sentence: ask her doctor or pharmacist.
• Print a price it cannot source. Today that means no prices at all, including for the advertiser.
• Publish testimonials, star ratings, review counts or invented family stories.
• Compare, rank or criticise other care companies, hospitals or facilities.
• Use a news outlet's name to borrow authority.

Corrections

Public pages change. When a linked source changes or disappears, the sentence that relied on it is corrected or removed, and the checked date on the affected page is updated. When a phone number on an agency's page changes, the directory entry changes to match, or comes down until it can be read again. If you find something wrong, tell the publisher, OwnersFirm, through ownersfirm.com, and include the page address and the sentence. Errors of fact are fixed; the fix is not announced as anything more than a fix.

What this desk is for

It exists so that the next fall, if it comes, goes a little better than the last one, and so that the decision about who is in the house at night is made in daylight. For the reading order, see start here.