Questions to ask the rehab team

Families tell me they cannot get a straight answer. Staff tell me the family has not asked anything specific. Both are usually right, and the gap between them is mostly phrasing.

Why does "how is she doing?" get you nothing?

Because it is unanswerable in the affirmative and socially costly in the negative.

Someone standing in a hallway with a medication cart, asked how your mother is doing, has two options. Say something warm and general — she's doing great, she had a good morning — or deliver bad news standing up, unprepared, to a worried relative. Almost everyone picks the first. That is not evasion; it is what an open question in a corridor produces.

The result is a family who has technically been answered several times a day and knows nothing.

What makes a question work?

Three properties. A good question has at least two of them.

• Specific — it asks about one observable thing, not a general state.
• Time-bound — it attaches to a day, a shift, or a deadline.
• Comparative — it asks about change rather than status, which is what tells you the direction of travel.

Comparative is the one families underuse most. In rehabilitation almost nothing matters in absolute terms; what matters is the slope. Forty feet means nothing alone. Forty feet, up from fifteen on Monday is the whole picture.

Which question belongs to which moment?

The useful question changes depending on where you are in the stay. Rather than repeat them here, each of these goes to the article covering that moment in full.

When you get a non-answer

I'll pass that along is a fair answer to a question aimed at the wrong person, and a deflection when it is not. Either way there is a next sentence, and none of them are confrontational:

• "Who would be the right person to ask?" — converts a dead end into a referral, and is genuinely useful when the question was misrouted.
• "When would be a good time to catch them?" — turns a vague promise into a time.
• "Could you note that in the chart so it's there for the next shift?" — for observations you want to survive a handover.
• "Can we schedule a care plan meeting?" — for anything needing more than a hallway. You can request one.

None of that requires being difficult. Most of it is asking for a time or a name instead of accepting a promise.

What if you live somewhere else?

A large share of the families in this situation are not in the building, or are there twice a week. Everything above still applies, but the mechanics change and a few things become worth doing deliberately.

• Call at a consistent time, and pick the right one. Shift change and medication passes are the worst moments. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon on a weekday usually finds someone who can actually talk.
• Ask who is on that day. A different nurse each call is normal; you are not being deflected. Getting a name each time is how you build a record.
• Say up front that you are calling from out of state. It changes how much context people give you, because they stop assuming you saw yesterday.
• Ask to join the care plan meeting by phone or video. Participation is a right, not a courtesy of proximity, and CMS guidance expects facilities to accommodate a representative who cannot attend in person.
• Have one person be the point of contact. Four relatives calling separately produces four partial pictures and a frustrated nursing station. One caller who then updates the family works better for everyone.

The comparative questions matter more at distance, not less. If you cannot see the change yourself, asking what is different from last week is the only way to get the slope rather than a snapshot.

Write them down before you go in

This sounds trivial and is the highest-yield thing on this page. Question lists are among the better-studied tools in patient communication — a qualitative study of question prompt lists found they helped people feel more able to ask, and helped them prepare and prioritise. The federal Questions Are the Answer programme rests on the same premise.

Three questions on your phone before you walk in beats twenty remembered in the car afterwards. Keep a running note with the date, who you asked, and what they said. It costs nothing, and in a stay where several people rotate through, you will be the only one holding the whole thread.