The short answer
- Write the whole week down before you divide itEvery job, including the phone calls and forms nobody sees happening.
- Distance rules out fewer jobs than people expectAppointments, benefits, bills and research can be held from two hundred miles away.
- Plan for the bad week as well as the good oneA named person against every job, and a second name for the days the first cannot.
- Settle the money in writing before anybody paysCarers on PrimeCarers charge £18 to £25 an hour with our fee included, against £28 to £35 through an agency.
Written for families who broadly agree what their parent needs and have to run it between them. The law, benefits and rates here are for England.
Dividing the work
Write the whole week down before you divide it
Dividing the care fairly is hard while most of the work is invisible. The sibling who lives nearest is carrying jobs nobody else has seen written down, and the ones further away are often waiting to be told what would help.
This page assumes you broadly agree about what your parent needs. If that is the argument you are having, when siblings disagree about a parent's care covers who holds the decision. The guide to caring for a parent is the wider picture.
Start with a fortnight. Write down everything done for your parent in it, by anybody, with a rough time against each job. Not the decisions, the ordinary work: the morning, the tablets, the shopping, twenty minutes on hold to the surgery, an evening lost to a form. The list tends to be longer than the sibling doing it remembers, and to hold work the others did not know existed. The same fortnight list is how a family works out what has gone after a bereavement, which when the parent who did the caring goes first sets out step by step.
Somebody has to be in the room
Whoever lives nearest carries these unless they are paid for.
- Getting up, washed and dressedEvery morning, at a fixed hour.
- Meals, drinks and the tabletsTwo, three or four times a day.
- Hospital and GP appointmentsDoor to door, and often a whole day.
- Laundry, shopping, bins, postSmall jobs, weekly, and they do not stop.
- Turning out when something goes wrongA fall, a wet bed, a bad hour at 3am.
Can be done from two hundred miles away
Real work, and a share a distant sibling can hold in full.
- Calls to the surgery and the hospitalIncluding the waiting and the chasing.
- Benefits and formsAttendance Allowance, a blue badge, council tax.
- Bills, the bank, the care accountAnd a record of what has been spent.
- Booking appointments and noting what was saidSo one person is not holding it all.
- Finding things outThe condition, the carers, the rates, the council.
- The evening phone callSame time daily, so there is a voice in the day.
Can be bought in
How a family evens out a rota that distance will not.
- The morning hourThe hardest part of the day, done by a carer.
- A lunch callA hot meal and some company midday.
- NightsA carer asleep in the house, or awake if nights are bad.
- A week or a fortnightCover while the nearby sibling is away.
The third column is what evens out a rota that geography will not. Where the first column lands on one person because they live ten minutes away, buying part of it back is a reasonable use of money rather than an admission of failure. You can search for carers near your parent and compare their rates before anybody commits, and working out how many visits a week your parent needs turns the list into hours and a weekly figure. When to hand over to a professional covers the jobs it is sensible to stop doing yourselves.
What distance allows
What the ones who live further away can take on
A sibling in another county cannot do the mornings. They can hold a good deal of the rest, because the jobs below run on a phone, a laptop and a diary. Each is a whole job rather than a piece of one.
The calls and the appointments
Weekly, and it eats a morning
Benefits, forms and the bills
A few long evenings, then monthly
Finding things out
Once, then as things change
Nights and weekends when you visit
When you come
Two things keep this from becoming extra management for the person nearby. A distant sibling holds a job end to end, chasing included, rather than doing the part handed over and passing the rest back. And what happened gets written where everybody else reads it. Caring for parents from a distance has more, and siblings are not the only people who can be on a rota: using friends, family and neighbours to care covers the wider circle.
The rota
A written rota that survives a bad week
A rota that only describes a good week will not last through the first bad one, and the bad weeks are when an arrangement collapses back onto whoever lives nearest. Write down the ordinary week, then what happens when it breaks.
What a written rota has to say
0 of 9 ticked
The ordinary week
The bad week
The jobs with no name on them yet
Keep one version of the rota where everybody can open it, and let one person edit it. Four copies on four phones leave you with the one nobody updated. The hardest line to write is what happens if the sibling doing the most is ill. If you get ill: the emergency plan sets out what goes in that plan and who needs a copy. For a planned gap, holiday cover while you are away covers booking a carer for a week or a fortnight, and the care plan guide covers the fuller written plan.
Who holds what
Who holds which information, and who talks to the GP
Once several people are involved, the same news has to reach all of them, and your parent has to stop answering the same question four times a week. That needs two decisions: where things are written down, and who speaks to people outside the family.
| What it is for | Who reads it | What to watch for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The family group chat | Short messages: she has eaten, I am going at six. | The siblings and anybody on the rota. | It scrolls away. Nothing you will need later belongs only here. |
| One shared written record | The rota, the medication list, what the GP said, what care costs. | The family, and anybody standing in. | It works only if one person keeps it current. |
| The care plan | What your parent needs, how they like it done, what to do on a bad day. | Family, and a relief carer who has never met them. | It dates fastest, so put a review date in it. |
| A carer's notes after a visit | What happened at that visit, and what the carer noticed. | The family, through the same record. | Anything urgent still needs a phone call. |
The family group chat
- What it is for
- Short messages: she has eaten, I am going at six.
- Who reads it
- The siblings and anybody on the rota.
- What to watch for
- It scrolls away. Nothing you will need later belongs only here.
One shared written record
- What it is for
- The rota, the medication list, what the GP said, what care costs.
- Who reads it
- The family, and anybody standing in.
- What to watch for
- It works only if one person keeps it current.
The care plan
- What it is for
- What your parent needs, how they like it done, what to do on a bad day.
- Who reads it
- Family, and a relief carer who has never met them.
- What to watch for
- It dates fastest, so put a review date in it.
A carer's notes after a visit
- What it is for
- What happened at that visit, and what the carer noticed.
- Who reads it
- The family, through the same record.
- What to watch for
- Anything urgent still needs a phone call.
The surgery is where a divided family causes the most trouble, because four people ringing about the same patient get four partial answers and use four appointments. Agree one named contact for the GP, one for the hospital and one for the council, each writing back to the record.
Your parent's medical information belongs to them, and a surgery will not usually discuss it with you without their agreement. Where your parent is content for one of you to deal with the practice, ask about family and carer access in the NHS App, also called a linked profile or proxy access. The NHS says you and the other person need to be registered at the same GP surgery, that the surgery sets it up and will ask for identification, and that you may then be able to book appointments, order repeat prescriptions and see test results. That usually puts it with the sibling who lives locally.
The money
Paying for care between you, and what to write down first
Money is where a working arrangement most often comes apart, and usually not over the amount. It goes wrong because nothing was written down, so a year later nobody can say what a payment was.
Your parent's own money comes first
The usual starting point
Siblings putting money in
Agree it before the first payment
Paying a sibling to do the caring
A different arrangement
On that last one, can my mum pay me to care for her? covers the tax, when your parent has become an employer, and what an attorney may do. Two figures are worth knowing before it. Carer's Allowance is £86.45 a week for somebody caring at least 35 hours a week, and gov.uk states that where somebody else also cares for the same person, only one of you can claim it. Where a sibling cares for at least 20 hours a week, Carer's Credit is a National Insurance credit that gov.uk describes as helping with gaps in a National Insurance record. Our guide to Carer's Allowance has the rest, and what care costs where your parent lives puts a local figure on the hours.
Where one sibling has more money than the others, an equal split is rarely the fair one. What tends to hold is writing down what each person puts in, in money and in hours, and reviewing both together. Paying for the mornings does not buy a larger say, and being unable to contribute money does not make somebody a smaller part of the arrangement.
The review
The review that stops it reverting to one person
An arrangement between siblings rarely collapses in one go. It erodes, because the person nearest absorbs each small change and nobody outside the house sees it happen. A date in the diary catches that.
- 1
Put the first review six weeks in
Week 6Long enough for the rota to have met a bad week, short enough that nothing has set hard. Fix the date when you write it. - 2
Ask each person what they have been doing
Twenty minutesGo round everybody, your parent included if they want to be there. Jobs get absorbed that were never agreed, and this is how they surface. - 3
Hold it against the rota you wrote
The point of the reviewWhere one person is doing more than the rota says, the rota changes or that part of the week gets paid for. - 4
Ask the person doing the most how they are
Every timeNot whether they are coping, which people answer yes to. Ask what they have not done for themselves, and what would let them take a week off. - 5
Write down what changed and send it round
The same dayTo everybody, including anybody who could not be there. An arrangement that lives in one head slides back to one person doing it all.
Whoever is doing the most can ask the council for a carer's assessment, and so can anybody else in the family who cares. The Care Act 2014 puts the duty on the council where it appears a carer may have needs for support, and says it applies regardless of the level of those needs or of anybody's financial resources. The NHS says a carer's assessment is free and that anyone over 18 can ask for one. Ours is what a carer's assessment is.
If the review keeps arriving at the same person at the end of their tether, read the signs of carer burnout and treat it as a reason to change the rota. Carers UK is a charity for unpaid carers, with advice for families.
Questions
Questions families ask about sharing the care
Write out every job in a fortnight with a rough time against it, then sort them by who can hold them: the ones needing somebody in the room, the ones that can be done from anywhere, and the ones that can be paid for. Put a named person against each, and a date to review it.
The calls to the surgery and the hospital, benefits and forms, the bills and the record of what care costs, booking appointments and noting what was said, the research, and a phone call each evening. The test is whether a job is held start to finish.
Put the fortnight on paper first, with times, because the scale of it is often what the others have not seen. Then ask for named jobs rather than help in general, starting with the ones that can be done at a distance. If the answer is still no, the question becomes which parts of the week can be bought in.
Work out what your parent can fund from their own income and savings first. For what is left, agree the amount, how often, how long for, and whether each contribution is a gift or a loan against the estate. Carers on PrimeCarers charge £18 to £25 an hour with our fee included, so the weekly figure is easy to put in front of everybody.
Yes, a parent can pay an adult child for care out of their own money. It affects that sibling's tax, their benefits and sometimes their employment status, and there are further rules if the council is paying or somebody holds power of attorney. Can my mum pay me to care for her? covers each.
No. Gov.uk states that where somebody else also cares for the same person, only one of you can claim it. It is £86.45 a week for somebody caring at least 35 hours a week, with an earnings limit of £204 a week after tax, National Insurance and expenses. A sibling caring at least 20 hours a week may instead qualify for Carer's Credit.