About Far Away Daughter

This site is written for one person at one moment: the adult daughter who lives in another city, whose mother lives alone in the St. Louis area, and who has just had the phone call that makes "she seems fine" stop being enough. It is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis company, and it carries one paid placement, labelled every time it appears.

Why it exists

Most of what is written for family caregivers assumes you are in the house. You are not. You are reading this at a kitchen table 500 miles away, between a work call and a school pickup, trying to tell the difference between a mother who is fine and a mother who is good at sounding fine. The public guidance for that exact situation is thin and scattered: the National Institute on Aging has a short series on long-distance caregiving, the Area Agencies on Aging have phone numbers, and the rest is agency marketing. This desk pulls the public pieces together, gives each one a St. Louis address, and says plainly what to do tonight and what to leave with her doctor.

It is organized as eight stops rather than a blog because that is how the worry arrives: first the phone call that does not add up, then the visit where something is off, then the search for someone local, then the hospital, then the decision about moving her, then the question of cameras, and finally the folder you wish you had started a year ago.

What it is, and what it is not

Far Away Daughter is a reference desk. It is not a clinic, not a licensing body, not a review site and not a directory that ranks providers. Help at home, the kind this site writes about, is non-medical: meals, a ride, a reminder to take the tablets already in a labeled box, company in the afternoon, a person in the house at night. Nothing here is medical advice, a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Nobody who writes for this site is a clinician, and no page is signed by a named person for that reason. Where a question is clinical, the page says so and sends it to the physician who treats your mother.

No page here names a facility, a hospital, a hospice or a company in order to criticize it. Hospitals appear only as pointers to their own public pages. No statistic appears without a link to the public source that published it, in that source's own numbers and year. The sources page lists every one, with the date it was opened.

The disclosure

One slot on this site is paid

New Plan Care, an independently owned non-medical in-home care company based in Chesterfield, Missouri, is a client of OwnersFirm, which publishes this site, and it pays for the featured placement on the home page and for the labelled mentions inside some articles. The two companies are not commonly owned. That placement is an advertisement with a phone number. It is not a rank, a score or a result, because nothing on this site ranks or scores anybody. The lead form on the home page sends your name, phone number and her town to New Plan Care and to nobody else; it never asks for a health detail and must never be extended to do so.

This desk does not print what New Plan Care charges by the hour. The company does not publish one, and a number we invented would be a lie. Call and ask. This site does not repeat any claim about licensing, certification, insurance or background checks on the company's behalf, and Missouri issues no license for private-pay companion and personal care companies, so absence from a state directory is not a mark against anyone.

How to reach the people behind it

Far Away Daughter is published by OwnersFirm in St. Louis, Missouri. Corrections to any fact on this site are welcome; the fastest route is to check the source list first, since every claim is tied to a public page you can open yourself. Questions about care for your mother go to New Plan Care at (314) 405-0887, or to the public agencies listed on the home page, none of which pay to be there.