Editorial Policy

Most sites tell you that everything is reviewed. This one cannot say that truthfully, so it says something more useful instead: exactly which pages carry a doctor’s name, exactly which do not, and why. Read this page as a map of who is answerable for what.

Part one: the pages Dr Farhat signs

Dr Nadia Farhat, MBBS, MRCP, is a consultant in geriatric medicine. She puts her name to the clinical set, and on those pages her name, her credentials and the date of her review appear in the byline. The clinical set is:

• medication and the medication round
• spotting when someone is getting worse
• falls at home
• delirium and how it differs from dementia
• pressure damage and skin
• continence
• eating, drinking and weight loss
• moving and handling someone safely
• the dementia pages
• palliative care, the last weeks, and dying at home
• hospital discharge, and the funding routes that turn on clinical eligibility

On those pages she checks three things. That the explanation matches current guidance. That the warning signs listed are the right warning signs, in the right order of urgency. And that the page states plainly when something is a call today rather than a question for next week.

Two standing rules apply to every clinical page and she enforces both. No page gives a medication dose, a dose change, or an instruction to give, withhold or adjust anything. Doses belong to the person who prescribed them and to the pharmacist. And every page about deterioration ends with an explicit “this is a call today” line, naming the signs and naming who to ring in each of the health systems the page covers. Carers read this material at speed, at night, on behalf of somebody else, and a page that leaves the urgency implied is a page that can be used to justify waiting.

Part two: the pages that are mine, with no reviewer byline

The pages about assessments, benefits, carer payments, means testing, attorney and substitute decision-making, employment, siblings, guilt and sleep carry my name only. There is no reviewer byline on them and that is deliberate.

A geriatrician has no special standing on benefits administration, tax credits, employment law or family dynamics. Putting a consultant’s name under a page about talking to your brother would borrow authority that had not been earned, and would also devalue her signature on the pages where it genuinely means something. So those pages are what they are: my experience of doing it, plus cited sources, plus the working shown. Where I am reporting a rule rather than an experience, the source is named and linked and you can check it yourself in about a minute.

The rule for anything added later is simple. If getting it wrong could harm the person being cared for, it goes to Dr Farhat. If getting it wrong costs money, time or temper, it does not.

I am a family carer. I am not a nurse, a social worker, a benefits adviser or a lawyer, and I have cared for exactly one person. Nothing here is written about your situation, because I do not know your situation.

Part three: countries, dates, and the annual re-check

Almost nothing in this subject is universal. The word for a carer’s payment, whether it exists at all, who assesses need, who pays for care and what a means test counts are all different in every country, and a site that quietly assumed one of them would be wrong for most of the people reading it.

So the house rule is: explain the mechanism once and generically, then give the named routes per system. Every page about money or entitlement covers at least three health systems, usually the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and Ireland, with the European Union framework where it applies. The mechanism (what an assessment is for, how a means test works, why carer payments have an earnings limit) is the part that travels. The names, the rates and the thresholds do not travel and are given per country.

Every rate, threshold and cost carries the month and year it applied, written into the sentence as “(as at March 2026)” or similar. This is not decoration. Benefit rates, earnings limits, means-test thresholds and care-fee averages change annually in most of these systems, which means a money page nobody maintains is quietly wrong within twelve months of publication.

Against that, this site commits to a full re-check of the money and entitlement pages every spring, when most of these systems uprate. When a figure changes, the page is updated and the updated date on it moves. When a page is re-read and nothing has changed, the date does not move, because a date that moves for no reason tells you nothing.

Clinical pages are re-read when the underlying guidance changes rather than on a calendar, and a review date only moves when Dr Farhat has actually read the page again.

Sources

Facts come from the primary source wherever one exists: national health services and health departments, statutory benefit authorities, national statistical agencies, NICE, the World Health Organization, the OECD, and the established national carer organisations. Research is cited to the study, not to the newspaper report of the study. Where the evidence is contested, the page says so and gives both sides rather than picking the more quotable number.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or right for one country and presented as though it were right everywhere, tell me through Contact and quote the page and the sentence. I would rather fix it than defend it. Corrections that change the meaning of a page are made on the page itself, not quietly.