Start here
Just found out she is coming home? Read in this order.
Nineteen articles is too many for a hospital hallway. Here is the path through them, one step at a time, in the order the days arrive.
You probably landed here from a phone, sitting somewhere you did not plan to be today. You do not need to read the whole site. You need the next thing, then the thing after that. Each step below names one read, says why it comes at that point, and tells you what to have in your hand when you finish it. If you only get through the first two steps before someone calls your name, that is fine. They are the ones that change what happens today.
Turn "she can't be alone" into hours. Start with what 24-hour supervision means in hours. The phrase sounds like a verdict. The article turns it into blocks of time and tasks, so the conversation with the discharge planner becomes a list instead of a feeling. You finish with a rough grid of the day and a pen mark on every hour nobody has claimed.
Decide whether today is too soon. If your stomach says she is not ready, read the hospital says she is ready, she isn't, then what to say about an unsafe discharge. Together they cover the Important Message from Medicare and the fast appeal, with a script you can say calmly. The clock matters here: Medicare says to follow the notice no later than the day she is scheduled to leave. If you cannot take her home at all, can you refuse to take her home walks through what that word does and does not do.
Get straight on what Medicare will send. Read does Medicare pay for someone to stay and, when you have ten more minutes, home health versus home care. This is the step that stops families waiting for a person who was never scheduled. Home health is visits. Someone in the house is a different arrangement.
Set up the house before the car pulls in. The 24-hour setup list is the one to print. If she is coming out of rehab rather than the hospital, read still cannot walk to the bathroom alongside it. If the discharge is tomorrow and nobody is lined up, jump straight to discharge is tomorrow and nobody is with Mom.
Fill the first week, starting with the nights. The 168-hour grid is where you write names into boxes: family, neighbors, hired help. How many hours of care after surgery and what to set up first help you size the blocks. Leave with the overnight covered, or with one call to make about it in the morning.
Know who to call before you need to. Save the hospital's public numbers from the West County discharge map, and if she was at Missouri Baptist, the Missouri Baptist read. The local help page lists the county, city and state lines, each checked on its own website.
Read the first-week pieces as the week happens. Day 1 to Day 7 is the overview. Keep confused since she came home, the walker she will not use, keeping him from going back and home from surgery for the day each one fits. You do not need them yet.
What this path will not do
It will not tell you whether she is medically ready to leave, what a new symptom means, or how to change a medicine. Those questions belong to her care team and her pharmacist, and every article on this desk hands them back. The path is about the paperwork, the house and the hours, which is the part that tends to land on a daughter with a job.
If you only have one minute
Ask the discharge planner who covers each block of hours tonight and tomorrow, by name, and write the answers in the folder. Then open the first 24 hours on the homepage. When you are ready for the reasons behind the list, come back to step one.
How this desk is written, and who pays for the one advertisement on it, is on how we write.