The Placement Desk

Search is the right tool when you know roughly what you want and have time to ring around. The desk is the right tool when you have a hard requirement and a date, and you would rather describe it once than telephone the county.

You post a request. Only operators whose homes actually match it can see it. They offer specific beds at specific rates. You decide who to talk to, and you record what happened.

Anyone can search the directory. Posting a request means operators will answer a stranger, so the ILA checks first that you are who you say you are.

1. 1Create an account and choose that you place people from a hospital, county programme or agency.
2. 2Give your employer, the kind of organisation it is, your role, and your direct work number. The work number is used to verify the account and is never shown to operators.
3. 3Tick the acknowledgement that requests on the desk describe a bed, not a person.
4. 4Submit and wait. Someone at the ILA telephones your employer to confirm.
5. 5When you are verified, the request form appears.

Use your work email address. A personal address makes the person checking your application ring back to ask, which slows it down.

1. 1Give the ZIP and a radius — 5, 10, 25 or 50 miles.
2. 2Set the monthly ceiling. Homes above it will not see the request.
3. 3Say how many beds you need, from one to four.
4. 4Give the date you need it by.
5. 5Choose men, women or either.
6. 6Choose shared acceptable or private only.

1. 1Tick the kinds of home that would work.
2. 2Tick only the house policies that are genuinely required.
3. 3Write a short note about what the placement needs — not about the person.
4. 4Post it.

Each offer names a specific bed in a specific home at a specific monthly rate, with an optional note from the operator. You can open the listing to see the home in full.

Where there is enough history, an offer carries a short reliability line built only from what has actually happened on the board — how quickly that home has answered, and how often its offers turned into placements. Below three observations it says so rather than guessing, and it never describes an individual.

1. 1Read the offers.
2. 2Press Start a conversation on the one worth pursuing. That is the only thing that opens a channel to an operator.
3. 3Agree the practical details — the bed, the rate, the timing.
4. 4Telephone the home. The board is not a substitute for that call.

Every request should end in one of four outcomes:

Closing a request withdraws the outstanding offers against it and closes its conversations, so operators are not left holding a bed for a placement that already happened somewhere else.