My Mum died in 2001 and my Dad, who was 10 years older than her, was left on his own. I was living 150 miles away and in a full-time job. My brothers were in the same area as my Dad and did their very best to help him, and gave him much support, but were going through all sorts of problems themselves.
The biggest problem was communicating with the relative authorities who, frankly, were not very helpful. My Dad also didn't want to give up his independence but couldn't cope - at all; he had poor mobility, was incontinent and allowed the dog (which he couldn't care for) to crap all over the house. With his apparent agreement we made several appointments for Social Services to go round and assess his situation - he would always contrive to be out on his little electric tricycle thingy on these occasions. Social Services acted as though such a situation had never occurred before, ever, in the history of the Universe!
Eventually, my Dad collapsed and was taken into hospital. Whilst in hospital he became seriously delusional. I lost count of the times that I talked to the hospital authorities who either denied that there was anything wrong with him or gave me a variety of different stories (I never got to speak to the same person twice - and none of these people appeared to have even met any of the others).
We did, eventually, get to speak to the hospital Social Worker who made it very clear that his main priority was to get my Dad out of the hospital and into a nursing home. To cut a long story short, my brother eventually got power of attorney, sold my Dad's house and got him into a nursing home. Here my Dad began to recover, was warm, clean and well fed and had plenty of people to talk to. Unfortunately, after a couple of months, he caught a chest infection, which turned to pneumonia, and he was back in hospital. The whole nightmare of evasion and poor communications stared again. After a few weeks my Dad died.
As you can probably tell, I'm still very angry about this. The attitude of the authorities seems to be that relatives have no rights to any information or advice - only obligations to provide money for the elderly relatives care.