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Guide · Preparedness

Family emergency information: what to write down

If the phone rang at three in the morning and you could not answer questions for two weeks, someone would have to keep your life running. Here is what they would need.

The three-in-the-morning test

Imagine the phone rings at three in the morning and you are not able to answer any questions for the next two weeks.

Someone has to keep your life running. Which mortgage payment is due. Whether the car insurance renews on Friday. Which neighbour has a spare key. What medication you take. Whether the business has a payroll run this week.

None of this is dramatic. All of it is urgent, and almost none of it is written down anywhere.

Why the temporary case is harder than the permanent one

When someone dies there is at least a legal process: an executor, a grant of probate, institutions with defined procedures.

When someone is incapacitated, none of that machinery starts. There is no probate for a coma. Unless a power of attorney is already in place, your family may have no legal standing to do anything at all — while the direct debits keep going out.

Which is why the single highest-value item on this page is not a list. It is a properly executed power of attorney, arranged before it is needed. Everything below is what makes that power actually usable.

What to write down

Health

• Medications, doses, and what you are allergic to
• Conditions a paramedic would need to know about immediately
• Your GP or primary doctor, and any specialist you see regularly
• Blood type, if you know it
• Any advance directive or living will, and where the signed copy is

The next fourteen days

This is the part people miss. Not the estate — the calendar.

• Bills and direct debits due imminently
• Insurance renewals that would lapse without action
• Commitments others depend on: school runs, care responsibilities, a pet with a routine
• Work obligations someone would need to cancel or cover
• Anything with a deadline that does not care about your circumstances

Access

• Who holds spare keys — house, car, office
• The alarm code, and how to reach the monitoring company
• Which device holds the authentication apps everything else depends on
• Whether a trusted person can reach your primary email if it truly matters

People

• Who to call first, second and third
• Employer, and who covers your work
• Solicitor, accountant, insurance broker
• Anyone who would want to know, but would not be told automatically

The household

• Where the stopcock and consumer unit are
• Boiler service company, and when it was last serviced
• Pets — vet, food, medication, routine
• Anything in the house that needs regular attention to avoid becoming a problem

Where to keep it — and who to tell

An emergency record has an awkward requirement: it must be reachable quickly by the right person, and not by anyone else. Those two goals pull against each other.

What works for most households is a split:

• The immediate essentials — medications, allergies, the first two phone numbers — somewhere physically obvious. A card in a wallet or a note on the fridge. Paramedics do not have your master password.
• Everything else — the full record, accounts, instructions — kept encrypted, with one trusted person knowing it exists and how it would be opened.

The second half only works if you actually complete the last step. A record no one knows about will not be found in an emergency, and that is the most common way this fails.

Keeping it current

An out-of-date emergency record can be worse than none, because it sends people confidently in the wrong direction. Two habits keep it honest:

• Review it annually, tied to a date you already remember.
• Update it at the moment something changes — a new medication, a new bank, a house move — rather than promising to do it later.

Start with one page

If the full digital legacy checklist feels like too much, do not start there. Write one page: medications and allergies, the first three people to call, where the spare keys are, and what is due in the next fortnight.

That single page covers most of what an actual emergency asks for. Everything else can follow.