Reports for families

Papers about your parent's care can build up: the care plan, letters from the provider, notes about visits. The guidance below is about one of those papers, the care plan, rather than an account of visits.

The care plan

Ontario Health atHome in Canada names, among the rights of a person receiving home and community care, taking part in drawing up and revising their own care plan.

Questions for a provider

Whether there is a written care plan for each client is one question the Alzheimer's Association in the US suggests putting to a home care agency, in its tip sheet on choosing in-home care for a person living with dementia. NICE's home care guideline for England also recommends telling the person using home care, and their unpaid carer, how their plan will be drawn up, negotiated and reviewed, and what options are open to them. NICE's guideline on people's experience of adult social care in England says care and support plans should be reviewed regularly, and should set out how and when those reviews will happen.

Questions about an account of visits, such as what it covers and how your parent gets hold of it, are ones to put to a provider with your parent.

Each source speaks for its own place, England, Ontario in Canada or the US, and arrangements elsewhere can be different.

For somewhere to put papers like these, Getting organized: documents, contacts, and access has ideas.