In an emergency
In an emergency, use appropriate emergency services. This page is only for keeping useful information together.
For urgent or life-threatening situations, use the appropriate emergency service. This page does not tell anyone how to treat an emergency, does not contain treatment instructions, and is not a substitute for professional assessment or for calling for help.
What the information can hold
Factual, current, and short — the aim is a page a stranger could scan in a minute:
Personal details
- Name, and preferred name if different
- Date of birth, if you choose to record it
Emergency contact
- Name, relationship, and their number
- A second contact, where there is one
Medical information
- Relevant diagnosed conditions
- Allergies
- A reference to your medication list — kept beside it rather than rewritten here
- Important access needs
ME/CFS support notes
- Light sensitivity
- Sound sensitivity
- Difficulty sitting upright
- Delayed processing — extra time needed to take in and answer questions
- Limited speech on worse days
- Needs written information
- Difficulty with repeated questioning
Communication
- Preferred method of communication
- Whether someone else can help communicate
- Whether more processing time is needed
Mobility & positioning
- Practical information already known to you — what helps, what does not work
- Nothing here needs inventing or researching; it is a record, not an assessment
“If I am communicating less, please do not assume I understand less.”
That sentence is worth writing in, for anyone whose speech or responsiveness reduces when very unwell — including people with severe and very severe ME/CFS, for whom it may be the most important line on the page.
Where it can live
The information belongs with you, wherever the right people will actually look: a card in a wallet, a phone lock-screen medical note, a page at the bedside, the front of a household folder. Emergency responders habitually check wallet cards, lock-screen information and care documents — placing the details where those searches happen is the practical move. For someone who is bedbound, the information lives at the bedside, where any responder will be, rather than perfect but in a drawer downstairs.
Telling one or two people where it is kept is often as important as the information itself. In an emergency, the useful detail is the one someone can actually find.
Keeping it current, and its limits
Tying updates to events that already happen — a prescription change, a new phone, the same day the smoke alarm batteries are checked — keeps the page accurate without it becoming a chore. Sensitive details like passwords do not belong on it; those live in a password manager, and the page points to whoever holds that access.
What this page is not: it is not an advance care plan, not an emergency plan created by this website, and not medical advice. It is a short factual record, kept by you, that may make a hard situation easier to navigate — nothing more, and nothing less.