About The Care We Need

I am Maura Kinsella. Rather than tell you the story of this site, here are the four dates that made it, in order. Everything on The Care We Need came out of one of them.

April 2022: the discharge

My mother had coronary bypass surgery. Twelve days later a nurse told me she was going home on the Thursday, and I said that was wonderful, because I did not understand that this was the whole handover. I was given a discharge letter with eleven abbreviations on it, a paper bag of boxes, and a leaflet about wound care. Nobody asked whether there was anyone at the house, whether the bathroom was upstairs, or who was going to do any of this. I went to stay for a fortnight. Within a week I was doing the tablets, the dressings, the shopping, the appointments and the nights, and I had not once said the word carer, to her or to myself, which turned out to matter more than anything else that happened that month.

February 2023: the first fall

She went down in the kitchen at about six in the morning and I heard it from the next room. She was not badly hurt, and because she was not badly hurt I treated it as an accident rather than as information. It happened again in the April. It took the second one, and a very patient triage nurse, for me to understand that a fall in an older person is a symptom with a list of causes behind it, and that the right response is an assessment, not a tidier kitchen. I learned in that year to tell the difference between a slow change over months and a sudden change over hours, and that the second kind is a phone call the same day. Almost every clinical page on this site exists because of that distinction.

2024: the year of the forms

I got a carer’s allowance application wrong twice. Not fraudulently, just wrongly, because nobody had told me that the hours test and the earnings limit interact, and because I had guessed at a question rather than ringing to ask. That year I also discovered that my mother had been entitled to an assessment of her needs for eighteen months, that I had been entitled to an assessment of my own in my own right and had never been offered one, and that neither of these things happens unless somebody asks. I went to three days a week at work in the autumn, and did not do the arithmetic on what that would cost my pension until much later, which is its own page now.

2025 into 2026: paid carers, and this site

In January 2025 two carers started coming in four mornings a week. I had put it off for about a year, on the grounds that accepting help meant I had failed at something, which I now think is the single most expensive belief a family carer can hold. It did not solve anything. It made the thing survivable, which is different, and that is the truthful version of what help does. Somewhere in that year I realised the lever arch file on my kitchen table was more useful than anything I had been able to find online, because it was organised by the question you have at the time you have it. I started writing it up. That is this site, and I am still caring, so it is still being written.

What this site is, and what it is not

The Care We Need is one person’s work. So that nobody has to guess:

• It is not a registered charity and does not present itself as one.
• It takes no donations and has no way for you to give it money.
• It carries no advertising, no sponsored content and no affiliate links.
• It has no membership, nothing to sign up for, and nothing to buy.
• It recommends no care agency, care home, product or law firm, and never will. Where you need to choose one, the site teaches you how to judge one instead.

What it does have is a scope line. The clinical pages, on medication, deterioration, falls, delirium and dementia, skin, eating and drinking, moving someone, and dying at home, are signed by Dr Nadia Farhat, a consultant in geriatric medicine, and her name appears on them. The pages about assessments, benefits, attorney paperwork, siblings and work are mine, written from experience and from cited sources, and they carry no reviewer byline because it would be misleading to imply a geriatrician had checked benefits law. The Editorial Policy sets out exactly where that line falls.

If something has changed today, the Disclaimer is a routed list of who to ring for each situation, and it is the page to open first. Otherwise, the Resources page lists national carer organisations by the moment you need them, and you can write to me through Contact.