The calendar on the refrigerator has the hospice visit days on it. The calendar on your phone has your job, your drive across the county, and the appointments you have been moving to make room. You are the person who answers for your mother or father when the hospice team is not in the house, and you live far enough away that the answer has to be planned, not improvised.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
Start the sizing from your own hours, not from the parent's day. Write down every block of time in a normal week when you are not in the house and cannot respond quickly: work shifts, the drive there and back, sleep, and your own errands and appointments. Write the drive in both directions, with parking and the walk to the door included, because that is the time you actually spend away.
Lay the hospice visits on top
Hospice visits arrive on the team's schedule, not on a fixed hour you can plan around. Ask the hospice team which days and time windows they usually use, whether they call ahead, and what happens if a visit runs late. Then mark the visits on the same sheet. A visit is a visit, not a presence: the nurse or aide leaves when the visit is done, and the hours after that are the ones you are sizing for.
Sort the gaps by what they need
Not every gap needs the same person. Sort them into three groups.
The first group needs someone physically in the house who can get to the room and make a decision. Mark those blocks in full.
The second group needs a check-in: a phone call, a visit to bring a meal, a look at the room. These can be shorter.
The third group is errands: groceries, the pharmacy pickup, returns. A non-medical caregiver can pick up a prescription as an errand and can give medication reminders. The medicines themselves stay with the family, the doctor, and the pharmacist, so mark any medication work as yours even when a caregiver is in the house.
Count what remains
Add up the first group by day, then by week. The result is the daytime help you need, and it is usually a fixed block on the same days each week rather than a loose number of hours. Write it as a schedule: which days, what start time, what end time, and whether the block can flex.
Then check it against the people you can call. If the person who covers the block is out, who is the backup? If the answer is you, the sheet is not finished yet.
What to ask before you fix the schedule
Ask any agency or independent caregiver whether they can hold the same block each week, what they do when their regular person is out, how far they will travel to your parent's house, and whether they can stay the full block without leaving early. Ask your parent whether this is someone they are willing to have in the room. That question is not a formality.
When the sheet reads as a schedule that someone has actually agreed to, and no block is only probably covered, you have sized the help to the house you have. For the wider picture of finding help in west county, see Local Help for Hospice Families.