What to Do After a Parent Falls

Call 911 now if any of these are true

We are not clinicians. We are a non-medical home care agency, and we will not pretend to assess an injury over a blog post. But there are situations where the decision isn't a judgment call, and every family should know them cold.

Call 911 if:

• Your parent hit their head — at all, even lightly, even if they say they're fine.
• Your parent takes a blood thinner. Head impact plus a blood thinner is an emergency call, every time.
• They cannot get up, or they can't put weight on a leg, arm, or hip.
• You see an obvious deformity, severe pain, or a limb that looks wrong.
• They lost consciousness, are confused, are slurring, or seem "off" in a way you can't explain.
• They are on the floor and you are alone. Do not lift an adult off the floor by yourself. You will hurt them, or you'll hurt yourself, and then there are two people on the floor.

If they got up fine, the next day still matters

Plenty of falls end with a parent back in the armchair, embarrassed, insisting it was nothing. That's not the end of it.

Call their primary care doctor within a day and describe what actually happened — where they were, what they were doing, whether they tripped on something or their legs simply gave out, whether they felt dizzy beforehand. That last detail is the one adult children most often forget to pass along, and it's the one a physician will want. Write it down before you call, because by tomorrow the details blur.

Then ask the question nobody wants to ask: has this happened before? A first fall is one conversation. A third fall that you're only learning about now is a different conversation entirely. Parents hide falls. They hide them because they're afraid the next step is a nursing home, and they'd rather risk the floor than lose the house. If you can make it clear early that you're trying to keep them home, you'll get a more honest answer.

The fear that comes after is its own problem

Here's what families aren't warned about. The bruise heals. The fear doesn't, not on its own.

After a fall, a lot of older adults start quietly shrinking their own lives. They stop going downstairs to do laundry. They stop showering when they're home alone, because the bathroom is where it happened — or because they've decided it's where it will happen next. They turn down the invitation to lunch. They stop walking the length of the driveway for the mail. They sit more. And sitting more makes the legs weaker, which makes the next fall more likely, which is the trap.

You'll see it in small ways first. A parent who used to meet friends on Thursdays suddenly has reasons not to. A parent who gripped the counter once now grips it the whole way across the kitchen. None of this gets said out loud. It just happens.

What breaks the cycle is usually not a lecture. It's having someone in the room. A person standing nearby during a shower changes the math on whether the shower happens. Someone walking next to them to the mailbox changes whether they go. That's most of what a caregiver does in the weeks after a fall — not hands-on lifting, just being present enough that the fear stops making the decisions.

What the weeks after a fall actually need

Families tend to prepare for the wrong things. They buy a grabber tool and a shower chair and then discover the real gaps are mundane and relentless. In practice, the month after a fall usually needs some combination of:

• Bathing and bathroom help. The highest-risk routine in the house, and the one a proud parent will skip rather than ask for help with.
• Someone there in the early morning and late evening. Getting out of bed and getting into bed are when it tends to happen again.
• Driving. To the follow-up appointment, to physical therapy, to the pharmacy. If a parent shouldn't be driving for a few weeks, that's not a small inconvenience — it's groceries, it's church, it's everything. Non-medical transportation has no minimum and is quoted per trip.
• Meals and the kitchen. Standing to cook is tiring after an injury, so people stop eating properly, and then they're weaker still.
• Nights. If a parent is getting up to the bathroom at 2 a.m. and that's when they fell, overnight awake care solves the exact problem. Guessing from another zip code does not.
• A second set of eyes. Someone who will tell you, honestly, whether your mother is steadier this week than last.

Whether you need companion care or personal care

The practical question is whether your parent needs someone with them, or someone with hands on them. Supervision, meals, company, light housekeeping, rides — that's companion care at $34/hour. Help with bathing, dressing, toileting, and transfers — that's personal care at $38/hour.

After a fall, the honest answer is often personal care, at least for a few weeks, even when a parent insists otherwise. If you're not sure which fits, we break down exactly what the extra $4 an hour buys and how to tell which one a parent actually needs. You can also start with one and move to the other; nothing locks you in.

If there was a hospital or rehab stay

Discharge happens faster than families expect, and it usually happens on a day that's inconvenient for everyone. If your parent is coming home from the hospital or a rehab facility after a fall, we keep a 4-hour post-discharge block at $44/hour specifically for that first stretch — the first morning home, the first shower, the first night. Our standard ongoing minimum is six hours, but the post-discharge block exists because the day you come home doesn't fit a normal schedule.

If you're in the middle of a discharge right now, our step-by-step guide to setting up home care after a hospital discharge walks through the order of operations — who to ask for, what to get in writing, and what to have in place before the car pulls into the driveway.

Starting care without committing to anything

Westmark is a locally owned Massachusetts agency based in Billerica, serving Greater Boston and MetroWest. Our caregivers are insured, bonded, and background-checked — CORI check, reference verification, in-person interview, and a skills evaluation before anyone sets foot in a house. Massachusetts does not license non-medical home care agencies, so be skeptical of anyone who tells you they're "licensed" for this work.

The first step is a free in-home assessment. No obligation, no deposit, no enrollment fee, no long-term contract. If things improve in three weeks and you don't need us anymore, you give 48 hours' notice and you're done. That's it. We'd rather you scale back because your mother got stronger than keep paying out of inertia.

Call (508) 233-8062. We answer 24/7, and a real person picks up — including at 11 p.m., which is frequently when adult children finally have a minute to think about this. Or request a quote and we'll call you.

Common questions