How to Prepare a House for a Returning Parent

Ask before you arrange

Before you change anything in the house, ask the discharge team a short list of administrative questions and write the answers down with the name of the person who gave them.

What does the house need to have in it before my parent can come home? What equipment is being delivered, by whom, and in what delivery window? Who is coming to the house afterwards, on which days, and from which organisation? What paperwork comes home with them? Who is our named contact afterwards, and what number do we ring outside office hours? When is the first follow-up appointment, and who books it?

Ask these plainly and write the answers verbatim on one sheet. Discharge conversations happen in corridors and are forgotten within the hour.

Then work only from those answers. If they say a bed is being delivered, ask for the window and clear the space it needs. If they say nothing is being delivered, ask who to ring if that turns out to be wrong, and write that number down too.

What you should not do is decide for yourself what needs changing about how your parent will manage at home. That is not a matter of confidence, it is a matter of who has the information. Ask, write it down, and act on what you are told.

The 24-hour list

Whatever else happens, these things need to be true before the car pulls up. Most of them take minutes and all of them are miserable to discover missing at nine in the evening.

Get the heating on early. A house that has been cold for a fortnight takes hours to warm properly, not minutes, and arriving into a cold house sets the tone for the whole week.

If you have time for nothing else, do the heating, the bed, the milk, the phone and the light at the top of the stairs.

• Heating on several hours ahead, and hot water running
• Bed made up, plus one spare set of bedding out and ready
• Milk, bread, and three simple meals in the house
• Bins emptied, fridge cleared of anything out of date
• Post collected off the mat and sorted into a tray
• A charged phone or a working landline within reach of both the bed and the chair
• Working bulbs in every lamp on the route from bed to bathroom
• A torch somewhere obvious
• Keys accounted for, and the key safe code confirmed with whoever will need it
• One clean towel out, and toiletries where they can be reached
• The car parked so the front door is directly reachable
• Somebody's phone number written large and left by the phone

Room-by-room clear and check

Walk the house along the route your parent will actually take: front door, to the chair, to the bed, to the bathroom, to the kettle. Clear that route completely. Nothing on the floor along it, and nothing that has to be stepped over or around.

Coil extension leads and move them out of the walkway. Wedge open the doors that do not stay open on their own. Move the small table that has migrated into the middle of the room since anyone last walked through with a bag in each hand.

In the room they will sit in, make sure there is a chair with arms, a lamp within reach, a small table beside it, and a place to put a cup down. Put the things they reach for daily at about waist height, whatever those things are.

Make sure the route to the bathroom is lit at night without needing a main light.

Decide where two specific things live and tell everyone: the phone charger, and the clean laundry. Both cause a surprising amount of daily friction when they have no home.

If equipment has been delivered, leave it where the delivering service placed it and ask them, or the visiting professional, before moving it. It was positioned by someone who knows why.

The kitchen and the shopping

Stock for a week that requires almost no effort, then ask before assuming anything about what should be in the house.

If food needs to change in any way, the discharge team or a dietitian will say so. Ask them directly, write the answer on a card, and put the card on the fridge where everyone doing the shopping will see it. Do not construct dietary rules yourself, and do not act on something a relative read somewhere.

Beyond that, buy what your parent actually eats, which is the only item on the list that really matters. A cupboard full of sensible food that nobody likes is an empty cupboard.

Portion and label anything you cook ahead: contents and the date, in marker, on the lid. Put a sheet on the fridge door listing what is inside it and when it needs eating, because a fridge that has to be opened and inspected is a fridge that gets ignored.

Settle the logistics of week one before it starts. Who is shopping, on which day, and who pays. A shared shopping list, written on paper on the fridge and photographed by whoever is going, prevents four loaves of bread and no butter.

• Bread, spread, milk and long-life milk, eggs, cheese
• Tea, coffee, squash or juice, bottled water
• Soup, and three meals that need one pan or one tray
• Fruit, biscuits, and whatever they actually like
• Kitchen roll, bin bags, washing-up liquid, cleaning cloths
• A written list on the fridge of what is in it and when it goes off
• A shared shopping list on paper, with a pen attached

The paperwork that comes home with them

Have a folder ready by the front door before they arrive, with five tabs, and use it from the moment you get through the door.

Discharge paperwork. Appointments. Who came and when. Equipment delivered. Questions to ask.

Put the discharge summary in tab one immediately and photograph every page. You will be asked for it by more than one organisation in the following fortnight, and the photograph means you can send it from the kitchen rather than hunting for it.

Tab three is the one nobody keeps and everybody later needs. Every professional who comes to the house gets a line: date, time, name, role, organisation, phone number, what they said would happen next. Keep a pen clipped to the folder and write the line while they are still in the hall.

Tab five collects questions as they occur to you, dated, so that when you do get five minutes with the right person you are not trying to remember what was worrying you on Tuesday.

This folder takes ten minutes to make and it is the difference between being able to answer questions and having to apologise for not knowing.

The first fortnight rota

Decide who is doing what before day one, and write it on a calendar that lives on the fridge.

Columns: date, slot, who, what this slot covers, confirmed, and a column for who actually went. That last column is the one that tells you the truth in three weeks' time.

Settle the overnight question first and in writing, because it is the one that gets assumed rather than agreed, and the assumption always lands on whoever lives nearest.

Leave a hardback notebook on the kitchen table as the handover book. Anyone who visits writes three lines before they leave: date and time, what they did, what needs doing next. Add what was bought and what it cost if money is being shared.

Keep the notebook administrative. If something worries you about how your parent is doing, ring the relevant professional rather than writing it in a book that no clinician will ever read.

Two rules keep a rota alive. Nobody swaps by text alone, because a swap is not real until it is on the calendar. And whoever cancels with more than forty-eight hours' notice finds their own cover, while anything shorter than that becomes the group's problem.

Questions