A daughter is told at four on a Friday afternoon that her mother is being discharged tomorrow morning. Her mother lives alone, cannot manage stairs, has new medication and no food in the house.
She has about sixteen hours and she is ringing agencies in alphabetical order. The first one that answers with a straight yes or no gets the placement.
Step 1: answer the availability question first
Can you start, when, and in which area. Everything else is secondary. A family in this position needs a yes or a no within minutes, and an honest no is more useful than a delayed maybe.
Step 2: capture the discharge date and time
Then the address, whether anybody will be there, and how the property is accessed. These four facts determine whether a package is possible at all.
Step 3: capture the care needs at a high level
Mobility, personal care, meals, medication support, continence and whether nights are needed. Enough to assess feasibility, not a full assessment, which happens with a person.
Step 4: establish who is coordinating
A discharge team, a social worker, a case manager or the family alone. It changes who the agency speaks to and how funding is arranged.
Step 5: ask about funding
Self funded, local authority, continuing care or a mix, and whether anything is already agreed. Families do not always know, and saying that it can be worked out afterwards keeps the conversation going.
Step 6: ask about equipment and access
A hospital bed, a hoist, a key safe, stairs and whether the home is ready. A package that cannot be delivered safely on day one needs to be known about on Friday, not Saturday.
Step 7: be honest about what you cannot do
Overnight cover you do not have, a specialist need you are not trained for or an area you do not reach. Saying so immediately lets the family ring somebody else while there is still time.
Step 8: explain what a starter package looks like
Visits per day, duration, what carers do and what they do not, and how it is reviewed after the first week. Families cannot picture it and are frightened of getting it wrong.
Step 9: explain how quickly it can be adjusted
Discharge packages are almost always wrong at first. Saying that a review happens within days, and that hours can go up or down, relieves an enormous amount of pressure.
Step 10: publish your rates and minimums
Hourly rates, minimum visit lengths, weekend and bank holiday differences and notice periods. Families are comparing agencies at speed and silence loses.
Step 11: escalate to a person immediately
Anything clinical, anything about capacity or safeguarding, and any family in distress needs a human now, which is the discipline in after hours emergency triage.
Step 12: cover the hours when discharges are arranged
Late Friday, weekends and evenings, exactly when offices are shut, which is the same night-time problem as overnight and waking night care enquiries and the last-minute pattern in last minute catering enquiries and what to ask.
Step 13: recognise the related enquiries
Cognitive change often accompanies a hospital stay, which is the ground in dementia care enquiries from families.
Getting started
Publish your availability, areas, rates and minimums, then capture discharge date, needs and access at any hour with instant escalation. SpideyChat for care providers answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.