Editorial guides
Practical articles, checklists and explanations built around Italian care homes, urgent placement, waiting lists and home-care decisions.
Featured guide
In most cases it is not a stranger on the phone — it is someone close. The signs, the mistake to avoid when you raise it with her, and the steps that actually stop the money leaving.
She has a fever and the home is asking what to do. What a hospital admission really does to a very old person, when it is clearly right, when it is often avoidable, and the form that means you never have to decide this at 2 a.m.
A short phone call, "a little fall, nothing serious". The questions to ask straight away, what the home must record and report, and why repeated falls mean something else entirely.
A discharge date is rare and valuable — it is a countdown, and almost every family wastes it. What intermediate care and reablement actually give you, why you should not make a permanent decision from a hospital bed, and the free assessment nobody asks for.
Confusion that appears over hours or days and comes and goes within the same day is not dementia. It is delirium, a medical emergency with causes that are almost always treatable. What to ask for today.
Heat alerts are public and issued by region, but most care homes were not built for them. What the guidance expects, which common medicines raise the risk, and how to check the plan exists before the next amber alert.
Continence is an NHS assessment, not a supply of pads — and a blanket allowance of a fixed number per day, regardless of need, is not care. Here is what should have happened, and the two causes that usually explain it.
Staff often frame it as two confused people not getting along. Under the Care Act it is a safeguarding concern — and anyone can raise it with the local authority, including you, without the home's agreement.
A room is not a bed to be reallocated — it is what the contract sold you. A term letting the home move a resident at will is very likely an unfair term, and a move into a locked unit is a different question altogether.
They ring: she had a fall, they helped her up, she is fine. Then it happens again. A fall is not automatically a failure — they happen in good homes too — but every fall should produce an assessment, a care plan change and a record. And where something goes wrong, the provider has a legal duty to tell you and apologise. Here is what to ask.
Most read
In most cases it is not a stranger on the phone — it is someone close. The signs, the mistake to avoid when you raise it with her, and the steps that actually stop the money leaving.
From 400 miles or another country you cannot tour ten homes or drop in daily. The local network to build before the crisis, the paperwork to hold, and how to use the visits you do make.
Almost nobody moves into a care home by decision — they move after a fall. The changes in order of effect, what the council pays for, and the signs home is no longer enough.
Clothes that survive an industrial laundry, the paperwork that actually matters, and the one page about her life that is worth more than everything else. Plus the classic first-day mistakes.
