The phone call comes earlier than anyone warned you. A nurse or a discharge coordinator tells you that your parent is medically ready to leave, and can you arrange to collect them in the next day or two. You put the phone down and feel a specific kind of blank. Not panic exactly. More like standing in the middle of a room trying to remember what rooms are for.

This happens to families constantly. NHS discharge policy has moved toward getting people home quickly, which is often genuinely better for recovery, but it can leave the people who love them scrambling. You are not disorganised. You were not given enough time. Those are different things.

Here is what to do, in the rough order that makes sense.

1. Ask the ward for the hospital social worker before your parent leaves

Every NHS hospital has a social work or discharge team whose job is exactly this situation. If no one has mentioned them, ask directly: 'Can we speak to the discharge coordinator or hospital social worker before my parent goes home?' Under NHS discharge guidance, a patient with ongoing care needs is entitled to a safe discharge, which means the hospital has an obligation to ensure support is in place. You do not have to accept a discharge date if a safe plan is not ready. The Citizens Advice hospital discharge pages explain this right in plain language, and it is worth reading tonight.

If your parent has already been discharged before you got a chance to ask, ring the ward anyway. Ask whether a referral has been made to the local council adult social care team. If it has not, you can make that referral yourself.

2. Contact the local council adult social care team today

Your parent is entitled to a needs assessment from the council, free of charge, regardless of their finances. Ring the adult social care duty line for the borough where your parent lives. Tell them your parent has just been discharged or is about to be discharged, that they have care needs, and that you need an urgent assessment. Use the word 'urgent'. Councils are obliged under the Care Act 2014 to carry out assessments, and they have fast-track processes for post-discharge situations. You may be placed in a queue, but you need to be in that queue starting now.

If your parent's needs are assessed as eligible, the council can fund a care package. They can also offer direct payments, which means the money comes to you (or to your parent) to arrange care yourselves, rather than being tied to whoever the council contracts with. According to gov.uk, direct payments give families more control over who provides care and when. If that flexibility matters to you, ask specifically about direct payments during the assessment conversation.

3. Ask your parent what they actually want

This sounds obvious but it gets skipped. In the rush to organise logistics, families sometimes arrive at solutions their parent hates. Does your parent want someone in the house? At what time of day? Are there things they feel strongly about doing for themselves? A care arrangement that your parent resists will collapse inside a week. Five minutes asking the questions now saves weeks of friction later.

4. Think about one carer, not a rota

What good care actually looks like, in any arrangement, is one consistent person your parent gets to know. Not a different face every morning from a pool of twelve. Not someone who arrives not knowing where the kettle is. Continuity is not a luxury. For someone coming home from hospital, especially if they are disoriented or frightened, a familiar face makes a measurable difference to recovery. Whatever arrangement you end up with, push for consistency: the same carer, the same times, ideally someone your parent has met in advance.

5. Know what questions to ask any carer before they start

Regardless of how you find a carer, confirm three things before any arrangement begins. First, have they been DBS-checked independently? Second, do they carry their own public liability insurance? Third, do they have experience with the specific needs your parent has right now, whether that is reduced mobility after surgery, catheter care, or medication management? Skills for Care publishes guidance on what care workers should be trained to do, and the Care Quality Commission expects providers to ensure staff are competent for the tasks they are asked to carry out.

6. Ring Age UK before you try to Google your way to a carer

Age UK's free advice line is 0800 678 1602. They have advisers who talk through exactly this situation every day, with no commercial stake in what you decide. Carers UK, on 0808 808 7777, is the right call if you are the one providing a lot of the care yourself and you need to understand what support exists for you too. These calls cost nothing and can save you from making decisions under pressure that you will regret at leisure.

What families in this situation often tell us they wish they had known is this: you do not have to have everything sorted by the day your parent comes home. You need to have the next forty eight hours covered and a referral in to the council. Everything else can be built from there.

If you would rather not piece this together alone from scratch, this is what Hibant exists for. We are a London introductory care agency. Every carer we introduce to a family has been DBS-checked, insurance-verified, and reference-checked by us before any introduction is made. You choose the carer yourself after meeting them in person, and you know exactly what you are paying and why. If a post-discharge situation is your starting point, we can move quickly. You can email us at hello@hibantcare.com or read more about how we work at hibantcare.com.

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