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.
It looks like the smallest problem there is, and it is not. It costs a few hundred pounds a year, it strips someone of the last things that are hers — and the Ombudsman upholds these complaints routinely.
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.
A person with capacity can refuse washing and medication, however unwise it looks. And covert medication is not a nursing shortcut — it has its own legal test, and it must never be a decision taken quietly on a shift.
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.
Two different things families rarely separate. NHS patient transport is free if she meets the medical eligibility criteria — but somebody has to request it. The escort is the part the home charges for, and it is the part that decides whether the appointment was worth going to.
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.
One of the hardest calls a family gets, and almost nobody explains it. The legal position is unusually clear: the Mental Capacity Act does not allow anyone to make a best-interests decision about sexual relations on another person's behalf.
Depression is not a normal part of ageing, and it is the condition most often met with an antipsychotic instead of a treatment. NHS Talking Therapies takes self-referrals — and older people in care homes are among the least referred of anyone.
Moving into a care home does not cancel NHS entitlement. Physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy remain available through the GP — but nobody in the building is responsible for asking, so usually nobody does.
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.
