For family

The first 72 hours home: a discharge checklist for a parent who lives alone

The most common version of this story is not a crisis. It is a stack of papers, a ride home, and a good luck. The hospital did its job, your parent is stable, and now you are standing in their kitchen at 9pm googling what "watch for" is supposed to mean. This is the checklist for that week. It is not medical advice. It is the practical stuff that gets missed in the handoff, written for the adult child doing this from another city.

Before you leave the hospital

Do these with the discharge planner in front of you. Once your parent is home, each one gets much harder to answer.

  • Get every paper in one place. Photos on your phone are fine: discharge summary, medication list, follow-up instructions, equipment orders, and the phone number for the unit.
  • Ask for the diagnosis in plain words. Not the code, not the term. What happened, and what is different about them now than a week ago.
  • Ask what the next 72 hours should look like. What is expected, what is normal, what is not.
  • Ask which number you call at 2am. Get the number a human answers, and ask what belongs on that line and what belongs on 911.
  • Settle the follow-up appointment. Who books it, when it is, and whether it is already booked. If the answer is "call on Monday," book it before you leave.
  • Get medication changes in writing. New, stopped, dose changes, with times.
  • Ask if the pharmacy has it in stock today. The single most common first-night problem.
  • Ask what they should not do. Lifting, stairs, driving, showering alone. Write it down.
  • Get the equipment orders. Walker, commode, hospital bed, oxygen. Who delivers it and when, because if it arrives after your parent does, you need to know now.

The first night

  • Decide who is physically there. If nobody is, decide who calls and at what time. Put it in both calendars.
  • Phone charged, charger by the bed. Not across the room.
  • Water within reach of where they sit and where they sleep.
  • Three days of food that needs no standing and no thinking. Not a grocery run. Actual meals.
  • A clear path to the bathroom, with a light on it. Night one is when people fall.
  • Pills sorted into days. A new medication goes in the box, not in a bag on the counter.

What "watch for" really means

The discharge sheet lists warning signs. Those are the ones that matter. Not a list from the internet, and not a number you remember from a TV show.

  • Copy the warning signs onto one index card: their numbers, their list, their phone number. It goes on the fridge.
  • Give a copy to whoever is with them. A neighbor gets a card too.
  • Use the discharge line for the warning signs, and 911 for the emergency list they gave you. Do not average the two.

The three questions that work on the phone

"How are you feeling" gets you "fine." Every time. Ask for a description instead:

  1. What did you eat today, and when?
  2. Did you take the pills, and did you take all of them?
  3. Did you get up and walk around, and how did that go?

Then ask one more: what is different from last week? Not what is wrong. What is different. A person will tell you they are fine and then mention they did not sleep, or the stairs felt longer, or they skipped the shower. That is the information.

Want the printable one-page version?

The whole checklist, formatted for the fridge. We send it by email, and we will not ask about your situation to do it. Just say where it should go:

Email us for the printable
What we're building

A note from the family at Ramona: we build tools that help you keep watch from another city without turning your weekly call into an interrogation.