Pharmacy layer (£40): ibuprofen + paracetamol (stock BIG bottles), aspirin (heart), loratadine/diphenhydramine (allergy/sleep), loperamide + oral rehydration salts (diarrhoea is a top killer when water goes bad — or DIY ORS: 6 tsp sugar + ½ tsp salt per litre), hydrocortisone, antifungal cream, laxative, antacid, cough meds, burn gel, electrolyte powder, 3+ months of every family prescription (ask your doctor for an emergency supply; many will).
Knowledge over kit: take a first-aid/Stop-the-Bleed course now (£0-50); store Where There Is No Doctor + Where There Is No Dentist (free legal PDFs — bundle them into the app and print them).
Sanitation — the unglamorous life-saver
Twin-bucket toilet (£25): two 5-gal buckets + snap-on toilet seat lid + sawdust/dry leaves/shredded paper as cover material. Separate wee (dilute 1:10 = garden fertiliser) from poo (cover every use, seal, compost 1 yr+ away from water, or bury 60 m from any water source, 20 cm deep).
Stock: bleach (also water treatment), bar soap (LOTS — cheapest disease prevention ever), toilet paper + the knowledge you can wash instead, bin bags (100s — waste, waterproofing, ponchos, solar showers), rubber gloves, wash basin, clothesline + washboard/plunger-in-bucket "washing machine."
Handwashing station: jug with a nail-hole tap + soap on a string. Cholera and dysentery follow disasters because people skip exactly this.
Solar shower bag (£10-15): black bag in the sun = hot water.
Going deeper
Everything above is from the household playbook. What follows expands on it.
The page above is a good buying list. This is about what the list is for, and the three things it is missing.
The kit is weighted toward the wrong emergency
The trauma layer is the most expensive part of the kit and the least likely to be used. A tourniquet, chest seal and haemostatic gauze are for catastrophic bleeding, which is real, survivable with them and unsurvivable without. It is also rare.
What a household actually meets, in rough order of likelihood:
None of this argues against the trauma layer. Buy it, because the failure mode is fatal and nothing improvises well. But buy it after the boring things, and notice that the cheap layers cover almost everything that will actually happen.
Teeth, which nobody packs
Dental pain is one of the most likely genuine emergencies in a long disruption, and almost no preparedness kit contains anything for it.
There is no dentist in a blackout, toothache does not resolve with waiting, and it is the kind of pain that stops somebody sleeping, eating and thinking clearly, which degrades every other decision they make.
Worth adding, for a few pounds:
Temporary filling material, sold over the counter, which reseats a lost filling or covers an exposed cavity.
Clove oil, which genuinely helps and is the traditional answer for a reason.
Dental floss and a soft brush, because oral hygiene lapses exactly when water is short.
A spare of any denture adhesive somebody in the house relies on.
The knowledge of what is beyond home care.
The parent page's reference shelf answer applies here too: Where There Is No Dentist is free, legal to distribute, and it is the single best thing to have on the shelf for this.
The prescription problem, honestly
The parent page says ask your doctor for three or more months of every family prescription, and many will. In the UK, mostly they cannot.
NHS repeat prescriptions are normally issued around 28 days at a time. That is a deliberate policy, it is not your GP being unhelpful, and no amount of explaining preparedness changes it. Some prescribers will consider a supply for genuine travel; that is a different conversation with a different reason.
So do the things that are actually available:
Keep the repeat list current and printed, with generic names, doses and frequencies. A pharmacist who cannot access records can often still help somebody who can produce that.
Order repeats the moment they are due, not when the box is nearly empty. That alone converts a scramble into a fortnight of buffer, permanently, at no cost.
Know which medicines are dangerous to stop suddenly, and treat those as the priority in any disruption. Anticonvulsants, long-term steroids, beta blockers, anticoagulants and insulin all belong on that list.
Know the pharmacy emergency supply route. A pharmacist can, in defined circumstances, supply a limited quantity of a regular medicine without a prescription. It is not automatic and it is worth knowing the route exists before you need it.
Keep the powered ones in mind. An oxygen concentrator, CPAP or powered feed pump depends on the grid, not the pharmacy, and that is an energy chapter problem.
Antibiotics, and why not
Preparedness writing often ends up recommending a stockpile of antibiotics, sometimes bought as aquarium or veterinary products. This app does not.
They do nothing for viral illness, which is most of what a household meets. They carry real adverse effects, including the gut consequences that matter enormously when water is short. The wrong one, at the wrong dose, for the wrong length of time, breeds resistance and can leave a treatable infection untreatable. And the infections that actually kill people in these scenarios usually need more than a tablet.
The genuinely useful preparation is upstream of any of that: clean water, hand washing, wound cleaning, covered food, covered waste. Those prevent far more infection than any stockpile treats.
Separating urine, or not
The parent page says separate urine from faeces, and dilute the urine one part in ten as garden fertiliser. The twin-bucket page in this app says mixing is fine and separating is an unnecessary complication. Both are defensible, and the difference is worth understanding rather than picking one at random.
For most households, mixing and covering well is the right call, because the system that gets used correctly under stress is the simple one. Separate if you want the urine as fertiliser and you have somebody who will run it properly.
Either way the cover material is the whole system, and running out of it is the actual failure mode. Stockpile it like food.
The item that does the most work
Soap. More than any dressing, drug or device in the kit.
Hand washing interrupts the faecal-oral route, which is what turns a sanitation problem into an outbreak, and the parent page is right that cholera and dysentery follow disasters because people skip exactly this. It is the cheapest line on the whole page and the one that lapses first, because water is short and washing feels like a luxury.
So make it structurally easy rather than a matter of discipline. A jug with a nail hole and soap on a string, at the toilet and at the kitchen, is the design that works. A bottle of gel somewhere in a drawer is the one that does not.
What this is based on
A tourniquet must be tight enough to stop arterial flow; one applied too loosely can occlude venous return while arterial bleeding continues, worsening blood loss
Oral rehydration solution can be made with six level teaspoons of sugar and half a level teaspoon of salt in one litre of clean water, and rehydration rather than antimotility medicine is the treatment that matters in acute diarrhoea
Dental infection that spreads beyond the tooth, with facial swelling, fever, or difficulty swallowing or opening the mouth, is a medical emergency rather than a dental inconvenience
NHS repeat prescriptions are normally issued in quantities of around 28 days and cannot generally be stockpiled on request, though prescribers may consider a supply for travel
Paracetamol has a narrower margin between the maximum dose and a harmful one than most people assume, and exceeding the labelled dose risks serious liver injury
Antibiotics are ineffective against viral illness, carry real adverse effects, and inappropriate use drives resistance; veterinary and aquarium antibiotics are not a safe substitute for prescribed treatment
Hand washing with soap interrupts faecal-oral transmission and is the single most effective sanitation intervention available to a household