A conversation nobody was having. Now more than 2,000 clinicians have it.

People with epilepsy can only make good decisions about their own safety if someone tells them what the risks are. Bereaved families, charities and clinicians all reported the same gap: those conversations were not reliably happening in the clinic.

Where the conversation did happen, it had no shared structure. Key questions got lost in short appointments, and there was no baseline against which a person's changing risk could be compared at the next visit.

SUDEP Action and Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust created the Checklist, and it has been supported since 2015 by a UK-wide development group of GPs, neurologists, specialist nurses, researchers and people living with epilepsy. Craig sits on that group as a clinical psychologist, bringing the behavioural and human-factors side of the question: not what the tool should ask, but whether people can actually use it under clinic conditions.

Alongside the advisory role, our research team ran the studies that put evidence underneath the tool: a case-control study testing whether the risk factors on the Checklist are the ones that actually predict harm, and further work on what changes when clinicians use it in practice.

The Checklist is used regularly by more than 2,000 clinicians and is available to over half of GP surgeries in England.

SUDEP Action report that its use raised risk discussions within epilepsy services from 10% to 80%.

The validation and implementation studies are published and citable, which is what lets a clinical tool of this kind be adopted at national scale rather than recommended locally.