A lot of families have been exactly where you are right now. The ward calls at four in the afternoon. Your parent has been in King's College Hospital for a week or ten days, and someone on the other end of the phone is using words like 'medically optimised' and 'discharge tomorrow morning'. You are standing in a kitchen in Peckham or Bermondsey or Herne Hill, and you realise you have nothing in place. No carer. No equipment at home. No idea who you are supposed to call or whether you are even allowed to say 'wait'.

You are allowed to say wait. And there is a lot more available to you than most families realise in those first panicked hours.

What the hospital is actually required to do before your parent leaves

NHS England's discharge guidance is clear that King's, like every NHS trust, is expected to carry out a proper discharge assessment before someone with ongoing care needs goes home. That means the ward team should have spoken to an occupational therapist, made sure any equipment (a grab rail, a raised toilet seat, a hospital-grade bed) is in place or ordered, and flagged your parent to Southwark Council's adult social care team if ongoing support is going to be needed.

If that has not happened, or it has been done in a rush with no family involvement, you can ask to speak to the ward's discharge coordinator or the ward sister and ask specifically: has a care needs assessment been completed? Has the family been involved? Is there a written discharge plan?

You can also ask for a short extension. Hospitals cannot simply evict someone before safe arrangements are in place. If you feel the pressure to discharge is unsafe, the first call to make is to Southwark Council adult social care on 020 7525 5000. They have a duty to respond to urgent adult care needs and they deal with King's College Hospital discharges routinely. If something goes wrong after a discharge that should not have happened, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman handles complaints at lgo.org.uk.

The Southwark Council route: what they can offer

Once Southwark's adult social care team is involved, they will carry out or arrange a Care Act assessment. This is the formal process that decides what level of support your parent needs and whether any of it will be funded. Depending on your parent's finances, they may qualify for council-funded home care, or at least for a direct payment, which is money paid directly to your family to arrange care yourselves.

The direct payment route is worth asking about specifically if you want more control over who comes into the house. It means you can choose a carer rather than accepting whoever a large agency happens to roster for a Tuesday. Carers UK (0808 808 7777) can talk you through how direct payments work and what your rights are if the council tries to close the assessment quickly.

Age UK's Advice Line (0800 678 1602) is also worth a call if you are not sure whether your parent would qualify for any funded support or if you feel the assessment is not being taken seriously.

The private route: what good care actually looks like when you are arranging it yourself

If you are paying privately, or if the council assessment takes longer than the discharge window allows, many families end up arranging a carer independently. When you do that in a hurry, the shape of what you're looking for matters.

Good care in any arrangement looks like this: one consistent carer rather than a rotating rota of different faces, a family that has met the carer in person before any commitment is made, a carer whose DBS check and insurance have been independently verified, and a direct relationship between the family and the carer rather than everything going through a coordinating layer that goes silent at seven in the morning when your parent needs help out of bed.

A lot of families tell us they wish they had known to ask for that kind of continuity from the beginning, because the disruption of a different face every day after a hospital admission can set recovery back in ways that are hard to measure but very real.

Hibant can sometimes help families in exactly this situation. We are a London introductory care agency, and we have introduced carers to families coming home from King's College Hospital before, often at short notice. The family always meets the carer before any arrangement begins.

What to do tonight, or first thing tomorrow

If the discharge call has already come, the single most useful thing you can do in the next hour is call Southwark adult social care on 020 7525 5000 and say: my parent is at King's College Hospital, they are being discharged and I do not believe there is a safe care plan in place. That one sentence triggers a duty response. Everything else you can figure out as you go.

If you are past that stage and already trying to get care arranged from home, the Carers UK Helpline on 0808 808 7777 is staffed by people who deal with this every day and have no financial stake in what you decide.

If you would rather not do all of this on your own, this is exactly the situation Hibant was set up for. We are a London introductory care agency. Every carer we introduce has been DBS-checked, insurance-verified, and reference-checked before you ever meet them. You choose the carer yourself after meeting them in person, and you build a direct relationship with them from day one. That matters enormously when someone has just come home from hospital and is frightened and tired. If you want to talk through what you need, you can email us at hello@hibantcare.com or have a look at hibantcare.com.

Hibant

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Useful links to keep handy

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