Elizabeth’s Wish is a national movement born from preventable loss, professional insight, and the urgent need to transform how NHS hospitals care for people living with dementia. Created by an HCPC-registered paramedic, whose grandmother Elizabeth died following unsafe and unaccountable hospital care, this initiative turns personal grief and frontline experience into purposeful reform.

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Every year, an estimated 480,000 people in England receive a formal dementia diagnosis, with nearly 1 million people living with dementia across the UK and numbers expected to keep rising [1][2]. Up to one in four hospital beds are occupied by someone with dementia [3], yet hospital environments, training structures, and governance systems are still not designed for their needs. Research consistently shows that people with dementia are at higher risk of delirium, falls, dehydration, functional decline, and prolonged hospital stays, much of it avoidable with proper systems and skills [4].

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Our mission is to confront these realities head-on.

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We exist to ensure that every person with dementia receives safe, compassionate, and accountable hospital care, not by blaming individuals, but by fixing the system that has failed for too long.

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Elizabeth’s Wish calls for a national, mandatory dementia-safe framework across all NHS hospitals, built on four core pillars:

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Training that reaches every member of staff, clinical and non-clinical, so that understanding dementia is universal, not optional.

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Governance and accountability, ensuring every Trust has leadership, reporting, and outcomes that can be measured, not strategies that gather dust.

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Environments and processes that reduce harm, including delirium-safe wards, carer involvement, and continuity of care.

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National consistency, so a person’s safety is never dependent on the postcode of the hospital they enter.

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This mission is both personal and systemic. It honours Elizabeth’s life, the experiences of thousands of families, and the dedication of frontline staff who want to provide better care but are not given the tools to do so.

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Elizabeth’s Wish is not about criticism, it is about commitment:

To dignity.
To evidence-based practice.
To safer hospitals.

To a future where no life is cut short because the system was unprepared to protect those who are most vulnerable.

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We are here to turn one story into national change and to ensure that what happened to Elizabeth never happens again.