The phone rings and it is the ward. Your parent is being discharged tomorrow, or the day after, and the nurse is asking whether there is care in place at home. You were not expecting this call today. You have been visiting, washing things, bringing food in, answering the same questions from three different doctors, and now someone is asking you to produce a care package by Tuesday morning as though that is a normal thing to do on a Monday afternoon. The panic that follows that call is not weakness. It is the reasonable response of a person who has been given a serious logistical problem with almost no time and no roadmap.

What most families do not know, and what nobody on the ward tells you, is that you have more rights here than the call made it sound like. You are allowed to say you are not ready. You are allowed to ask for more time. And there are specific people within the hospital whose entire job is to help you with exactly this situation.

The discharge team is not optional: ask for them by name

Every NHS hospital has a discharge team, sometimes called a discharge coordinator, a hospital social worker, or a patient flow team. Their job is to make sure a patient is not sent home into an unsafe situation. According to NHS England discharge guidance, hospitals must carry out a discharge assessment before sending a patient home, and that assessment should include whether safe care is available. If nobody has mentioned this to you, ask at the nurses' station for the name of the discharge coordinator on the ward. Ask in person if you can. Ask by phone if you cannot get there. Write down the name of whoever you speak to and the time you called.

If your parent has significant care needs and no care is arranged, you can ask the hospital to request a social care assessment from the local authority before discharge happens. This is your right under the Care Act 2014. The council is not obliged to arrange care instantly, but the hospital is obliged to involve them when a patient has complex needs. That involvement takes time, which is exactly the point: it can slow a premature discharge down.

If you feel the hospital is trying to discharge your parent before it is safe to do so, Citizens Advice has clear guidance on your rights. You can also escalate a complaint to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman if the discharge process causes harm.

What the council can do, quickly

If your parent has not had a social care assessment recently, or ever, this is the moment to ask for one. You can contact your local council's adult social care team directly. The number is on the council website under adult social care or social services. Ask for an urgent assessment given the hospital discharge timeline. Some boroughs have emergency provision for exactly this scenario, including reablement care, which is short-term support offered free of charge to help someone recover at home after a hospital stay.

Reablement is not a permanent fix and it does not always start the day someone comes home, but it is worth asking about specifically because it costs the family nothing while longer-term arrangements are sorted out. Age UK's Advice Line on 0800 678 1602 can help you understand what your parent may be entitled to in their borough, and they have no commercial stake in the answer.

If you need to arrange private care yourself, today

Sometimes the council timeline and the hospital timeline do not meet in the middle, and you end up needing to find a carer privately and quickly. This is frightening when you have never done it before. What good care actually looks like in this situation, in any arrangement you make, is this: one carer who knows your parent, not a rota of strangers. A carer your parent has met and agreed to before coming home. A carer who has been independently DBS-checked and whose insurance has been verified before they set foot in the house. A clear agreement on hours, tasks, and what happens if the carer cannot come. These are not luxury asks. They are the minimum that makes the arrangement safe.

We at Hibant have spoken to many families who went through exactly this scramble and arranged care in two or three days when they had to. What they consistently say they wish they had known is that it is possible to move quickly without cutting corners on vetting, but only if you start the calls that same afternoon, not the morning your parent is due home.

If you want help finding a vetted carer quickly, Hibant is a London introductory care agency. We work with families who need care arranged at short notice, and every carer we introduce has been DBS-checked and insurance-verified before we make the introduction. You can email us at hello@hibantcare.com or visit hibantcare.com. Carers UK on 0808 808 7777 can also help you think through the options with no commercial pressure.

Tonight, do this one thing

Call the ward tomorrow morning, first thing, and ask to speak to the discharge coordinator by name. If you do not have a name yet, ask the nurse who picks up. That conversation is the one that either buys you more time or connects you to the people who can move the fastest. Everything else, the council route, the private carer route, the reablement conversation, flows from knowing what the hospital is actually planning and when.

If you are reading this at midnight and the discharge is tomorrow, ring Age UK's Advice Line when it opens at 8am on 0800 678 1602. They have heard this before. They will not make you feel stupid for being unprepared. Nobody is prepared for this call.

If you would rather not navigate this on your own, we are here. We are a London introductory care agency, and we work with families in exactly this kind of urgent situation. Every carer we introduce has been DBS-checked, insurance-verified, and referenced before we put them in front of your family, and you meet the carer yourself before any arrangement begins. We can move quickly when a family needs us to. If you want to talk it through, email hello@hibantcare.com or visit hibantcare.com.

Hibant

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