Looking after parents from a distance: a practical guide

I live in Edinburgh. My mum lives near Bristol. My sister is in London. We are a typical British family in that sense — spread across the country and trying to look after a parent without anyone living next door.

If you are in the same boat, here are the things that have made the biggest difference for us, in plain terms.

Get one local person in the loop

Distance care without a local contact is genuinely hard. Even if no family lives nearby, find one of: a neighbour, a friend from church or the bowls club, a cleaner, a hairdresser. Someone who is there in the everyday and would help if you asked. Get their number. Tell them your name. Buy them a Christmas card.

Fixing this single thing makes everything else easier.

Replace ringing with a daily signal

If your only check-in is a phone call, you'll either ring too often (annoying for them, draining for you) or not enough (worrying for you). A small daily signal — a button in an app, a daily text — replaces a lot of those calls without making anyone feel chased.

This is exactly the gap a daily check-in fills. It doesn't replace ringing them for a chat, which is a separate thing. It replaces "are you okay" being the first sentence of every call.

Put visits where everyone can see them

If you're not the one driving over, you depend on knowing when others are going. A shared calendar of visits is the simplest, most boring thing to set up, and it changes how the whole family operates. You can plan around it. You can spot gaps. You can ring on a quiet day rather than a Sunday when she's already had three visitors.

Don't use everyone's main calendar. Have a separate one just for this.

Plan visits in advance, not after

Distance care is much easier if visits go on the calendar two or three weeks ahead. You aren't a Sunday-night-message-each-other operation. You're a we-all-know-the-pattern operation. The pattern can be loose, but it should exist.

Save the right phone numbers

Saved in your phone, today:

• Their GP surgery
• The neighbour you've befriended
• The warden or careline scheme if applicable
• The local non-emergency police line (101 in the UK)

Most people don't have any of these saved. Hunting for them in a panic is no fun.

Visit fewer times, longer

If you are in another city, a quick weekend dash is exhausting. Two longer visits a year — a weekend, a long bank holiday — let you actually do things. Sort out the airing cupboard. Get the boiler serviced. Notice the changes that don't show up on FaceTime.

Quality plus distance is a better recipe than frequency plus stress.

Don't try to do it perfectly

You're not going to do this perfectly. Nobody does. The aim is "your loved one isn't alone, and you aren't running yourself into the ground". Keep it gentle.

If a small daily check-in plus a shared visit calendar would help: try Getwello. It is built for exactly this.