A new communication tool to help conversations when staff are wearing Personal Protective Equipment

Having read an article about a critically ill intensive care patient terrified when they couldn’t understand what the healthcare team were saying through their personal protective equipment, Rachael Grimaldi, an NHS anaesthetist was inspired to create a simple free communication tool to overcome this barrier: CARDMEDIC. From concept to launch in 72 hours, in just over three weeks it has already been accessed by over 7,800 users with over 31,000 page views across 50 countries and 6 continents, including across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada, Asia and Africa.

The Real Talk team, along with NIHR Research Fellow Dr Lucy Selman, and Palliative Medicine expert and author Dr Kathryn Mannix, partnered up with Rachael to provide rapid, evidence-based advice on the wording on the End of Life specific components. Kathryn Mannix had been part of a Twitter conversation about #MaskedCommunications, and this is how we came across the CARDMEDIC communication tool. Here, Rachael explains the inspiring story behind it.