I was ill for two days and realised there is nobody behind me at all. Who is meant to cover when the carer goes down?

#1K. McAllister(Joined Nov 2025 · 11 posts)June 30, 2026, 10:15 pm

Stomach bug, two days, nothing serious, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I could not drive. I rang my mother four times on the first day and could hear that she had not had lunch, and there was nothing whatsoever I could do about that from my own bathroom floor. In the end a neighbour went in, who did not know where anything was and did not know that the back door sticks.

What has actually frightened me is the version where it is not a stomach bug. I am 61. If I go into hospital for a week, the honest answer to who takes over is NOBODY. Not one person on this earth knows what happens in that house in a day. It is all in my head and my phone.

So what do people do about this? Is there a system thing I have missed, or is it just find a friend and hope?

#2dee1972(Joined Apr 2025 · 24 posts)July 1, 2026, 7:44 am

Both, but mostly the second, and I say that having spent two years assuming there must be an official answer.

What I did in the end was write it down. Boring, and it took an evening.

#3Maura KinsellaAdmin(Joined Sep 2024 · 168 posts)July 1, 2026, 2:38 pm

There is a system answer and it is thinner than it should be, so I will give you the honest version in two parts: the part you control, which is most of it, and the part somebody else is supposed to do.

The part you control is a single page, and Dee is right that it is boring and takes an evening. What goes on it is not a care plan in the professional sense. It is the contents of your head, made findable by somebody who has never done this. A timetable of the day, with times, because a timetable can be followed. What she cannot do alone, and what she will claim she can, which is the line that stops a fall on the first evening. What she takes and where it is kept, and who the prescriber and the pharmacy are, without doses or instructions to change anything, because that belongs to them and not to us. Every number worth ringing. Where the key is, who else has one, and the fact that the back door sticks, which is exactly the kind of detail that is only ever in one person's head. Then what settles her and what frightens her, in three lines.

Two copies. One in the front of the folder, one physically handed to whoever you name, and a photograph of it on your phone. A plan on your own laptop is a plan that exists nowhere, which I know because mine was on my laptop the January I had flu and could not get up the stairs to fetch it.

Then name two people rather than one, and ask them out loud rather than deciding it about them. The first is the twenty four hour person, and it is usually geography rather than love: the neighbour, the friend two streets over, whoever can be there in an hour and open the page. The second is the person who could hold a week, and for most families that is not a person at all, it is a service, which brings me to the thin part.

The system part is that almost nothing is triggered unless you are already on a record somewhere. In England and Wales, section 10 of the Care Act 2014 requires the local authority to carry out a carer's assessment where somebody provides or intends to provide care and appears to have any level of need for support, and what happens if you cannot continue is exactly what that assessment is supposed to consider. It is also the record a duty officer can find at eight on a Saturday evening, which is the practical reason to have it rather than the moral one. Elsewhere the shape differs. Australia routes carers through Carer Gateway, which does include emergency respite as well as planned. In the United States there is no assessment of that kind at all, and what exists is the National Family Caregiver Support Program under the Older Americans Act, reached through your Area Agency on Aging, which funds respite and carer training. Ireland and Canada are local, so the question is who assesses eligibility for home support here and how a referral is made.

One honest caveat, because this site does not oversell things. Emergency respite is slower everywhere than the word emergency suggests, and the trial evidence for respite generally is weak rather than positive: the Cochrane review found four small trials, rated the evidence very low quality, and concluded that it does not demonstrate benefits or harms, which the authors themselves say may reflect the lack of good research rather than a lack of benefit. Arrange it anyway. Just find the route while nothing is wrong, because finding the route is the slow part, not making the call.

If something happens to you is the full version of all of this, with the five systems set out.

#4tomsdaughter(Joined Jan 2025 · 31 posts)July 2, 2026, 8:09 pm

The bit nobody warns you about is how the asking feels.

I put off asking my neighbour for about four months because I had built it up into this enormous imposition, and when I finally did it, standing on her step with the page in my hand, it took two minutes and she said of course and then told me she had done the same for her father in law. I had spent four months protecting her from a conversation she was completely fine with.

What you are asking is not will you do my job. It is will you answer the phone and open this page. People say yes to that.

#5stephen_58(Joined May 2026 · 5 posts)July 6, 2026, 11:52 am

Reading this with a sinking feeling because my honest answer to the two names question is one name, and it is my daughter, who is twenty six and lives abroad.

Not much use as a first call. I do not have a second person. I am not sure what you do when the list is genuinely empty rather than just unwritten.

#6K. McAllister(Joined Nov 2025 · 11 posts)July 29, 2026, 6:30 pm

Update, four weeks, and thank you all.

Page written. It is a page and a half, which I am told is cheating. Copy with the neighbour, who was fine about it in the way Tom's daughter described, and a copy with my brother who was less fine about it but took it, which I am counting.

Rang the council and asked for a carer's assessment using those words. Booked for the eleventh. The woman on the phone asked me whether I had anyone who could take over in an emergency and I said no, and she made a note of it, and I sat there afterwards thinking that is the first time in three years that fact has been recorded anywhere.

Stephen, I do not have an answer for the genuinely empty list, and I do not think this thread has produced one. What I would say is that the assessment is the one route that does not depend on knowing somebody, so if I were you I would start there rather than with the page.