Nearly every transplant, paediatric and cancer program is near a hospitality house, and nearly every one of them is grateful for it. The gap is not in the house. It is in what happens to the families it cannot take, which in most programs is nothing at all, decided by no one.
A hospitality house has a fixed number of rooms, a catchment, and eligibility rules that usually turn on distance, the patient's age, or the treatment type. Demand is not fixed. So on any given week some proportion of eligible families will not get a room, and that proportion goes up exactly when the program is busiest.
None of that is a criticism of the houses, which do remarkable work on small budgets. It is an argument for the program to own the overflow, because the house cannot.
It is worth being specific, because the groups are predictable and each one is a family in the middle of treatment.
In the absence of a defined answer, families do what anybody would: search a booking site, take whatever is cheap, and end up further away than they should be, sometimes in a place that is a poor fit for someone recovering from treatment.
The cost of that shows up later and elsewhere. A family in a motel twenty minutes away with no kitchen, for a two-week protocol, is a family more likely to shorten the stay, miss a follow-up, or not come back for the next cycle. The lodging decision has become a clinical one, made by nobody.
The work here is smaller than it sounds and it is mostly a decision rather than a project. Somebody has to own the question "what do we tell a family who did not get a room", and the answer has to be more specific than a list of links.
If you take one thing from this, take this: ask the house how many eligible families it turned away last year. Most can tell you, and most programs have never asked.
That number is the size of the group your programme is currently not serving, and it is usually larger than anybody expects. It is also the number that turns this from a sympathetic observation into a case somebody can act on.
If you can, that is a good thing to do and it is not in tension with any of this. It is a capital-scale answer on a multi-year timeline, though, and it does not help the family whose treatment starts on Tuesday. Most programs need both.
Ask the house for the number of eligible families they could not accommodate in the last year. It is usually a figure they track and rarely one the programs around them have requested.
Not for cost, and not for the community that a house provides, which is a real part of what those families get. It is a substitute for having nowhere defined to go, which is the actual alternative on offer.
Less urgently, and that is good news worth confirming rather than assuming. The check is the same: ask them how many they turned away, and how that number moves through the year. Seasonal peaks catch programs that believe they have capacity on the annual average.