Hospital · Checklist
Here is a scene I have watched more times than I can count. It is nine days after discharge. Something is off: a wound looks angrier than yesterday, or a new pill is making her sleep all afternoon, or the walker that was supposed to arrive never did. The family knows this is not a 911 situation. They also have no idea who to call. So they call the hospital main line, get transferred twice, leave a message for a case manager whose name nobody wrote down, and eventually give up and go to the emergency department, because at least the emergency department answers the door.
That is almost never a medical failure. It is a phone number failure. By the time someone leaves a hospital, six or seven different organizations have a piece of their care, and the numbers arrive scattered across a discharge packet, a business card, a magnet from the equipment company, and a sticky note. This guide is about putting them on one page before you need them, and there is a free one-page printable at the end.
Medicare's own discharge planning checklist tells patients and caregivers to make sure they know who to contact with questions after they leave. Good advice, and in practice the information exists but is unusable: fourteen pages of paperwork with the numbers buried in three of them, at 8 p.m., while you are trying to decide whether this is a tonight problem.
A contact sheet solves a narrow problem well. It is one page, it lives on the refrigerator or in the binder, and it answers a single question fast: for this specific worry, who do I call first?
Nine entries cover almost every situation in the first month home.
Above all nine entries, the sheet should say one thing plainly: in an emergency, call 911. A contact sheet is for the enormous middle ground between "fine" and "emergency," and it should never become a reason to hesitate. If someone has chest pain, trouble breathing, sudden weakness or trouble speaking, uncontrolled bleeding, or a fall with a possible head injury, that is 911, and the sheet can wait.
I would also write one honest sentence under the numbers: if you are not sure, call. Nobody has ever been annoyed with a family for calling too early. That is true, and families do not believe it until a nurse says it out loud.
Write who owns what, not just who they are. "Dr. Patel, cardiology, 555-0110" is a phone number. "Dr. Patel, cardiology, 555-0110, owns the heart medications and the fluid weight" is a decision. The second version means someone else in the house can use the sheet without calling you first.
Date it. Care teams change fast after a hospital stay. A sheet dated three weeks ago is trustworthy. An undated sheet from an unknown month is why someone calls a surgeon who signed off two months ago.
The best moment is the one nobody feels like using: discharge day, in the room, while the person who knows the answers is still standing there. Ask directly. "Before we go, can I get your name and the number for the unit, and who I should call in the first week if something looks wrong?" Discharge nurses answer that question happily. It is one of the few things on discharge day that is entirely within your control.
Our companion guide on what to ask before your parent leaves the hospital covers the rest of that conversation, and the hospital to rehab to home guide covers what to capture at each move if there is a facility stay in between.
I have made the contact sheet a one-page printable, laid out in the order you would actually use it: the 911 line across the top, then the contacts with room for who owns what, then a "first call for a question like this" quick guide at the bottom, and a date field. Print it, fill it in with a pen on discharge day, and put it on the refrigerator. Download it here, no signup required. It is also included in the full Caregiver Binder Kit.
Paper on the refrigerator works, right up until the problem happens somewhere other than the kitchen. In SafeHands, the same information lives in the care team and provider section of a person's profile, so it is in the pocket of whoever is standing there. Everyone in the Care Circle sees the same list, which means the sibling driving to the appointment has the same number you do, and updating it once updates it for all of them.
SafeHands organizes and shares what you record. It does not diagnose, and it never replaces your care team.
For anything urgent or frightening, call 911. Otherwise, start with the primary care office during business hours, or the after-hours nurse line if the office is closed. In the first few days specifically, the discharging unit is often the fastest source of an answer about the stay itself. If the problem is that something arranged at discharge never happened, that is the case manager.
The case manager or discharge planner is the person who arranges what happens after the hospital: home health, equipment, facility placement, and the paperwork behind it. When a service that was promised does not materialize, they are the one who can fix it, and their name is the single most commonly lost piece of information on discharge day.
That decision belongs to a clinician, which is exactly why the after-hours line is on the sheet. Emergency warning signs are always 911. For everything else, calling and asking is the right move, and it is what those lines exist for.
List each one with the problem they own. When you are not sure which of them a question belongs to, the primary care office is the right default; part of their job is routing.
This guide is drawn from clinical practice. For more from institutional sources:
A note on what this guide is (and isn't): this article and the printable help you organize and share contact information. They do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations, and a contact sheet is never a reason to delay care. If you are concerned, contact a qualified healthcare professional; in an emergency, call 911.
