Agencies describe themselves in friendly, confident language. That is a fair starting point, but it is not something you can compare one office against another with. The useful move is to take the agency's own words and turn each plain claim into a row you can check. A claim you cannot test is a claim to ask about.

Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.

Collect the claims. Read the agency's website, brochure, and any sign-up sheet. Copy out every sentence that says what the agency does, how it staffs visits, how it screens its people, how it handles changes, and how it tells families what happened during a visit. Set the adjectives aside for now and keep only the statements of fact.

Turn each claim into a row. A line like our aides are carefully matched becomes a row asking how matching is done, who does it, and whether the family can decline a match. A line like we keep families informed becomes a row asking how often visit notes arrive, in what form, and who receives them. Write each row as a question that can be answered with a yes, a no, or a specific example.

Test the rows on the tour. Bring the sheet to the office visit. Ask each question and write down the answer in the staff member's own words. Then ask to see a sample of the document the claim refers to, such as a visit note, a care plan, or a schedule change form. If no sample is offered, mark the row as unproven and move on.

Mark the gap, not the tone. Use three marks only: confirmed with a document, confirmed by a clear answer, and unproven. Do not give extra weight to an answer that sounds warm. Two offices that both say they keep families informed can end up in very different places once you see an actual sample.

Line up the offices in one table. Put the agencies across the top and the rows down the side. Blank cells are open questions. Cells backed by a document are the ones you can rely on when the week gets hard, and those are the cells to weigh most heavily when you decide.

The desk's own approach to sources and how it weighs them is laid out on the How We Rate page.