To ask for advice? Worried about elderly family member.

[Chocolatefrogs]

Just asking for advice, really.

One of my relatives lives on her own and she can be a bit tricky to contact and get hold of. She is elderly and had a major operation a few months ago, after which she stayed with some of us during her initial recovery for a couple of months. Despite the operation, she is very energetic and extremely independent.

She normally keeps in touch with family by writing letters, and although she has a mobile, she only uses it to call us and she never picks it up if we call her.

It was her birthday a few days ago, and I could track the delivery of the present I sent her. I saw that it had been left outside her front door rather than being collected by her in person at the door. A few other family members sent her presents and they also saw that their presents had been left outside the door.

I’m getting worried about whether she’s okay, as the presents have not been picked up by her in person. Neither me or any other family members have the contact numbers of my relative’s neighbours, to check if she’s okay.

Out of everyone, I live the closest to her - about 2 hours away from her. I’m thinking about either visiting her myself, to check if she’s okay, or seeing if the police will do a welfare check.
What would you do? My gut is telling me to go and visit her. Thanks.

Positive update: spoke to another relative who said she heard from the elderly relative on her birthday. Phew!

Crossposted with update.

Glad to hear but maybe as a family you can plan for some other ways to keep in touch to make things easier for the future? Next time you visit approach a neighbour, see if your relative is open to having a video call device like an Alexa/Echo at home, see if you can get contact details of the local GP etc.

Good idea @Gardencentrevoucher - thanks!

I don’t think my relative will want to have any sort of tech - e.g. Alexa, Google Home - in her house, but I think asking the neighbours for their contact details as an emergency contact would be really helpful.

In terms of speaking with the neighbours though, I worry about how to do that without seeming like I’m ‘going over my relative’s head’ and doing it without her blessing, if that makes sense. As my relative is so independent and she can be a bit ‘stubborn’ - which she is well within her rights to be! - I don’t think she’d want us to have the neighbours’ contact details, so that we can check on her in an emergency. I don’t think she would agree to it, so I feel a bit stuck.

If your relative is not willing to put back up plans in place then there's not much you can do except ask/offer again in future. Ultimately you can only offer to help. If she won't accept help or plan ahead for later life challenges then sadly she'll have to live with the consequences if she does have an accident or fall unwell. And if that does happen in future then please don't feel guilty. Refusing to put a Plan B in place means accepting she may end up with noone to help her in an emergency.

That’s all very true and an excellent point - thanks, Garden. I’m checking with my family if they think it would be a good idea for us to ask the relative’s neighbours for their contact details in an emergency - providing our relative is okay with that.

As you say, all we can say is check that with our relative, to see what she says. I like to think that, by suggesting this, we’re suggesting something positive and practical to support her, even though she may not agree to go ahead with it, which she is of course within her rights to do.

This happened with an elderly friend of mine/my mum's. She seemed to go silent. I tried to reach her through her HA, Age UK, the council adult social care team. I wasn't asking for her details as it's against GDPR, but they wouldn't even pass on my message or check on her, or acknowledge she even existed!?
Finally another friend contacted us and she was in a care home. It took months and months to find out though.

Does she have a landline?

My mum struggles with a mobile and would never cope with an Alexa or similar.

I do have the neighbours' numbers anyway and we have regular calls (on the landline)

You could frame it as "I get worried would you do this to help me worry less?"

Maybe suggest you give the neighbour your number rather than the other way round? Then it might just happen naturally.
Maybe suggest a careline button?

Unfortunately she doesn’t - she just has a mobile, which she doesn’t really use.

It sounds harsh to say, but she can be a bit combative and irritable, partly because she wants to be so independent - and is absolutely capable of this - and also because she’s had a difficult life.

Given all of this, I think she’d probably dismiss anything anyone says about asking her if she’d consider doing certain things because it would worry us less. She would probably reply that it wasn’t necessary, as she’s perfectly capable - which she is, but she’s elderly and unwell, which makes things harder for her.

Her mind is absolutely perfect, but her body is starting to slow down, as often happens with age.

In that case just talk to the neighbours anyway and get their number.

No need for her to know.

That is a good idea, although how would the neighbour know when to check on the relative, as our relative isn’t close with her neighbours? That’s my main worry with that option. Providing that relative and neighbours agree, my suggestion instead would be that we could exchange contact details with the neighbours, so they have our number and we have theirs, so we could contact the neighbour if we were ever concerned about our relative after not hearing from her for some time.

Is it out of character for her to have not made contact to say thanks for the presents? When did the relative who was in contact speak to her? If it was after the presents arrived and all was well then that's reassuring, but if it was early doors before the deliveries then it may still be worth trying to get in touch.

I found my Dad's body last year after he went uncharacteristically off radar (despite a nearly 2 hour drive I also got there sometime before the police did). Hope it turns out well.

Would she be prepared to have a wrist or pendant alarm?

My DM has one from Taking Care. As well as the alarm which she usually forgets they installed a box in her kitchen which monitors whether she is using the kitchen like normal, if it's warm enough. They also speak to her through the box.

Honestly it has been a godsend. I've been rung by them when her heating packed up, when she's had a fall, when she was poorly and didn't get out of bed.

Just to say if she's frail and living on her own with no local support she needs a plan and you need contact details in place so if anything happens you can get in touch with her and vice versa.

Sadly our elderly NDN was too independent and proud to have a plan B (or a working phone!) She was ashamed of the state of her home and wouldn't let the BT engineer in to fix it.

It took 2 days after her fall for us neighbours to realise she hadn't put out her weekly bins, or taken in her milk. We got in the back door and found her and she was taken to hospital with a broken hip. We looked for an address book with contact details for any family (cousins, who were probably elderly themselves) but no luck.

Her goddaughter knocked at our door 2 months after her fall after she realised she hadn't had a Xmas card from her godmother and couldnt get through on the phone. No-one had her POA so it took a while for the goddaughter to get NDN into a good local care home - where she actually thrived for a further 4 years.

It is out of character, in a way.

Previously I kept in touch with her by letter, and we would write to each other fairly regularly, and she would always send me a letter to thank me for her birthday presents. Since her operation, she has barely written to me or to anyone else, so I think we were expecting she’d get in touch via phone instead.

The tricky thing with that is that she won’t necessarily phone everyone, so we’ve needed to work out which relative she’s spoken to, if any. We’ve now found out that she spoke to our other relative after her presents arrived, which is a good sign.

I’m so sorry about your Dad 🌺🌺 I was frightened about a similar scenario happening here with my relative, which is what prompted me to start this thread.

I’m so glad to hear the alarm had worked out well and been helpful for your Mum. I think it would certainly be beneficial for my relative, but because she’s so insistent on being independent and she’s not really frail or anything like that, I think she would refuse it unfortunately. I can understand why she would refuse it, so I think my only option here is to look into exchanging contact details with her neighbours, so we can ask for their help on checking in on her when we haven’t heard from her in a while and are getting worried about her.

Thanks for this. Your neighbour is so lucky to have you as neighbours - you all sound really lovely and caring. I hope my relative’s neighbours would do the same!

It's taken years to get the alarm going so you have to go on and on and on about it.

The box works well as she doesn't have to remember to wear it or do anything. It just sits there and 99.99% of the time is forgotten about.