Have you or someone you care about deteriorated in a hospital emergency department? By partnering with you from the very beginning and throughout the process, we aim to create a better way to ensure no patient is ever overlooked when they need urgent help. Whether your experience was recent or in the past, your insights could help us rethink and improve safety.

Deterioration is when someone’s health gets worse while they are being cared for. Some examples are changes in breathing, heart rate, or alertness. Recognising and doing something about deterioration early can prevent harm. The systems that hospitals use to detect and respond to deterioration don’t always work as well as they should, especially in busy emergency departments. Important warning signs can be missed, and responses may come too late.

We believe that people who have experienced deterioration – as a patient or carer – hold many of the answers about what better hospital ‘safety nets’ should look like. That’s who we are hoping to partner with.

If this is you, we hope you will help us think about things like:

• how clinicians can proactively detect deterioration
• how staff can get better at listening to patients and carers who raise concerns, and
• what tools, systems and processes might be needed.

If you are interested, we’d love to hear from you. Select ‘Sign Up’ on the left of this page and we will be in touch.