In an emergency
What a hospital asks when they can’t ask the patient
Somebody arrives at hospital and can’t answer questions. Inside the first hour, staff will want four things, and a family standing in a corridor rarely has more than two of them.
None of this is about dying. Most of the time it’s a bad couple of weeks that ends with everybody going home.
The four things are the medication list, the allergies, whether there’s an advance directive and who holds it, and who is allowed to make a decision if it comes to that.
The medication list, which is harder than it sounds
Not "blood pressure tablets". The names, and roughly the doses, and which of them are taken in the morning.
Anybody who has tried to recite somebody else’s prescriptions under pressure knows how quickly it goes. Four medicines is about the point where memory stops being reliable, and a lot of people over seventy are on more than four.
A photograph of the boxes on a phone beats a good memory every time. So does a printed page, which keeps working when the phone is dead.
Allergies, and why they’re asked twice
You’ll be asked more than once and by more than one person. That is deliberate, and it isn’t a sign anybody has lost your answer.
Penicillin is the common one. So are reactions to contrast dye and to anesthetic, and those two often only came up during a procedure years ago, so the family has never heard about them.
Next of kin is who they call, not who decides
This is the most common misunderstanding in the whole business, and it costs families real time.
Next of kin is a relationship. It decides who gets the phone call. It does not, on its own, give anybody the right to make a medical decision on somebody else’s behalf.
Deciding takes a document naming a person, and it goes by different names depending on where you are. An advance directive covers what somebody wants. A healthcare proxy or power of attorney for health names who speaks when the person cannot.
Whether you’ve one, and where it is, is a question for an attorney. Whether the hospital can find it at two in the morning is a question for your family, and that one is answerable tonight.
A document nobody can find does nothing
An advance directive in an attorney’s office, closed for the weekend, isn’t doing any work. Neither is one in a safe whose combination is in the head of the person in the bed.
The version that works is a copy somebody can get to. On the fridge, in the folder by the front door, or in the hands of the person most likely to be rung first.
One page, written on a Tuesday
All four answers fit on a single sheet. Medicines, allergies, whether there’s a directive and who has it, and who to call.
The useful time to write it is a Tuesday when nothing is wrong, because it takes twenty minutes then and is impossible to do at all on the day it is needed.
Those four things are ruled out on a page you can print, free, with nothing to sign up for: the one-page emergency sheet.
Sources
Those four answers fit on one page, and a page can go on the fridge. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.