The one-page profile for someone who cannot explain themselves
Somebody who cannot explain themselves gets explained by whoever is standing nearest, from memory, three or four times in an hour, to people who write none of it down. A one-page profile fixes the portable half of that problem. It says the same thing every time, and a stranger can read it in about thirty seconds.
The method matters more than the layout. You can do all of this with a pen.
Write it in the person's voice
I, not he, not she, not the client. Use the person's own words even where the grammar is theirs rather than yours, because whoever reads it in a corridor should hear the person and not a report about them. Where the person can tell you what goes on the page, that is the page — write down what they said, not a tidied version of it.
Start with the name they are actually called. That is very often not the legal name, and getting it right is the cheapest thing you can do to make the first minute go well.
Three lines, and they are the whole page
Every profile has one box that carries the rest: the things that would go wrong first if nobody knew them. Hold it to three lines.
Not because three is a magic number, but because a page nobody reads is worse than three lines everybody reads — and at the moment this sheet gets handed over, nobody reads the page. The limit is the point of the exercise.
Choosing the three is the real work. A useful test: what would a stranger get wrong in the first ten minutes, and what would it cost? Pain that will not be reported. The thing that must never be done from behind. The person who has to be in the room. Everything else gets a box of its own further down, where it is still there for whoever has time.
Say what to do, not what is missing
Description tells a reader what to be frightened of. An instruction tells them what to do. I can point to what I want is worth more than I cannot talk, because one of them is actionable and the other only raises the temperature.
Write plain imperatives. Tell me before you touch me. Wait — I need about ten seconds to answer. Ask one thing at a time. Short sentences, present tense, one idea per line.
The line families leave out
What the person does when they are not understood is the line that most often changes how the next hour goes, and it is the one most often missing. Going loud. Going still. Walking out. Pushing a hand away. Laughing.
A stranger reads any of those as aggression, refusal, or not caring, and the response to a misread reaction is what makes the rest of the day worse. Write three things: what it looks like, what it means, what to do about it. That turns a frightening moment into an expected one.
What the page should not carry
Amounts. Our profile tool holds no number, no unit and no medicine name, and will not be persuaded to. A number copied by hand onto a sheet that lives in a bag is a number waiting to be copied wrong, and the copy in the bag is always older than the one on the prescription.
What the sheet does carry is when something happens, in your words, plus who holds the details and where the actual prescription is. Timing is genuinely worth writing down. The amount belongs where somebody keeps it current.
The same reasoning puts a plain line on the page itself saying this is not a medical record and nobody has checked it. That warning has to be printed, not filed in a footnote, because this sheet gets photocopied and carried a long way from anything that could explain it.
Printing one
The About Me emergency profile lays out eight blocks in that order and gives you a print-ready page plus a plain-text copy to paste into an email or a form, generated on your own device. Any box you leave empty prints as a captioned write-on rule, so one run is both a filled profile and a blank template for a marker pen.
Type shrinks and wraps but never below the minimum sizes printed with the page. If words still will not fit, it cuts trailing lines, names exactly which ones, and keeps every word in full in the text copy underneath. It names no scheme, no programme, no charity and no standard, and it has no view about anybody. The people who know the person are the authority on their care.