End of life care and funeral arrangements....How much do new care home need to know?

[mrjelly]

I think you need two doctors to sign the death certificate for a cremation and only one for a burial, so they need to know what to tell the doctor.

As for end of life care, I think the most important thing to decide for us was when to stop the home calling an ambulance to send Dad to hospital when he was getting dehydrated and blacking out again. He could have been going in every fortnight, if we hadn't said enough was enough and we knew that wasn't what he wanted.

 

[Pickles53]

As a sideline to this I believe my dad will want to be cremated away from where he lives now so as to be near his mother and other family members. Would I have to put down a funeral directors where he lives now and another near where he will be cremated? I'm lucky to have only been involved in one funeral so far so I'm a bit naïve where this is concerned.

This was our situation. We first spoke to the funeral director in the area where the cremation would take place. This was the company name we gave to the care home and they had a 24-hour phone contact service. This firm then arranged to liaise with a firm local to the care home who would initially take mum's body from the care home and the two firms arranged all the transport themselves. They were very good about keeping the family informed all through so we knew exactly where mum was. We were quite worried about how this would work but apparently it is quite a common situation and funeral directors should be used to dealing with it.