When Mum Goes to Hospital: What Actually Happens, and How to Get Through It

This one is personal. It's written from real experience of eight hospital admissions in a year, not a general overview. If you're in the middle of this right now, you might want to come back to it when things are calmer.

The call that starts it

It would always start with a call from the home. "Mum's fallen, she's okay, but we want to get her checked over." From there it usually meant a trip into A&E, and Mum lost in the system for three or four days until she was fully checked over and discharged back to the care home.

Hearing "she's waiting for the ambulance" is alarming. All sorts of thoughts come into your head. That fear, before you even know anything, is real, and it's worth naming rather than pushing down. It doesn't mean something is definitely wrong, and it doesn't mean you're overreacting to feel it every single time.

The system she disappears into

Communication and updates were hard to come by. She'd normally be passed from A&E to an AMU ward, and sometimes another ward after that, before being discharged. Each handoff between teams means new staff who don't yet know the full picture, and each one is a place where information about the person, their normal baseline, what's usual for them versus what's new, can get lost.

Three or four days of this is common, not a sign that anything unusual has gone wrong. It's simply how long full assessment often takes. Knowing that in advance doesn't make the waiting easier, but it can stop it feeling like something has been forgotten.

Being transported alone

Sadly, she was always transferred on her own, and that was the hardest part. She didn't really understand what was happening. For the person themselves, that confusion may be brief and half-remembered. For the family, watching it happen, knowing they're on their own in that ambulance, is often the moment that stays with you longest.

It's always worth asking whether someone can travel with them, or follow immediately behind, even if the answer has been no before. Circumstances and staff change, and asking again costs nothing.

What almost nobody tells you: delirium after hospital

Her condition always worsened after hospital admissions. She would become more delirious. This isn't just one family's experience. Alzheimer's Society confirms it's common for people with dementia to become delirious in hospital, since delirium is usually the brain's reaction to a separate medical problem, an infection, pain, or even just the unfamiliarity of the environment itself, rather than a sign that the dementia itself has suddenly worsened. They're also clear that someone may need more care and support for a while after they leave hospital than they did before they went in, and that for some people, full recovery from that episode of delirium takes weeks, not days.

If delirium in your own family has meant vivid hallucinations or not being recognised, read what that can actually look like, and how to prepare family and friends before they visit.

Almost nobody tells you this beforehand. Finding it out for the first time, mid-crisis, makes an already frightening moment feel worse than it needs to. It's worth knowing in advance: a hospital stay can genuinely make someone with dementia seem like they've stepped backwards, and that this is a recognised, common pattern, not necessarily a permanent decline.

When discharge feels too soon

There were times she was discharged and the care home felt she shouldn't have been. That meant playing piggy in the middle, and a fair bit of ambulance bingo, managing the back-and-forth between two professional teams who weren't always talking to each other, and challenging medical opinion to try to get the best outcome for her.

If you, or a care home, feel someone is being sent home before they're ready, you're allowed to say so. Raising it with the ward's discharge team or the nurse in charge is a normal, expected part of advocating for someone who often can't advocate fully for themselves. It doesn't always change the outcome, but it's never overstepping to ask.

The falls you can't prevent

They became more frequent as she fell more and more. Some were less serious than others. Some were more concerning, injuries to her fingers, real pain in her hip. No matter what was done, they couldn't be prevented. Even asking whether the floor could be padded didn't stop them happening.

This is worth saying plainly, because it's easy for families to quietly carry blame that was never theirs to carry: some falls happen despite everything being done right. Asking the question, trying the precaution, and it still happening anyway isn't a failure on your part.

Learning your own pace

In the beginning, every admission meant rushing down. Over time, that changed. Eventually, the process became familiar enough to know the protocol, and to judge when going down really mattered and when it didn't. Choosing not to rush every single time was a hard, quietly sad realisation, but it also meant considering yourself within all of it, not just the person in hospital.

Most advice about caring assumes that always rushing to be there is the measure of how much you love someone. It isn't. Learning your own pace, working out when your presence will genuinely change something and when it won't, is a skill that develops with real experience. It protects you enough to keep showing up for the times that do matter, rather than running yourself into the ground for all of them equally.

A word from The Care Compass

If you recognise any of this, the fear of the phone call, the waiting, the feeling of being passed between wards with no one person holding the full picture, you're not managing it wrong. Hospital admissions with dementia are genuinely this disjointed for most families. Learning the pattern, and eventually your own pace within it, isn't giving up on rushing to be there. It's what lets you keep showing up for however long this goes on.

This article is for general guidance only and does not constitute medical advice. If you're worried about someone's condition right now, contact 999 in an emergency, or 111 for urgent but non-emergency concerns.

You don’t have to navigate it alone.