Founder of app to keep over 65 year olds out of hospital wins innovation award
Nurse Liz Blacklock has earned a £75,000 in a Women in Innovation Award
A registered nurse has been awarded £75,000 as part of a Women in Innovation Award after she created an app that helps to keep people over 65 from needing to go to hospital by catching signs of delirium early.
Liz Blacklock, who has spent 38 years in nursing across palliative, primary and social care, co-founded CareBoodle in 2025 with the intention of keeping people out of hospital and being cared for at home.
“I’ve had this idea in some form at the back of my head for years,” said Liz, from Bishop’s Waltham. “Having come from nursing, I know exactly what can happen - a massive delay in discharge where people go into hospital, and then there's a problem with the care, and then the whole thing just snowballs.”
Her app is aimed at carers, who can lodge changes in people’s behaviour to be sent to GPs and healthcare professionals to flag signs of delirium early.
“When I was nursing, delirium was never a word I used. To me I associated it with 100 years ago in the Victorian workhouses,” said Liz. “It is far better recognised now…that's what makes this the moment.”
Delirium is a sudden change in mental state, including confusion, disorientation and altered awareness, that comes on over hours or days. It is common in people over 65 and is often mistaken for dementia or missed completely.
A 2025 report by researchers at Queen Mary University of London estimated that delirium cost the NHS £10.8 billion in 2022, and many cases are preventable. The people most likely to see the change first are carers, who until now have not had a clear route to act.
Liz said the app is for logging even “subtle changes” in order to catch symptoms early.
“It might be something like normally they’re out of bed but today they’re not, or normally they would have had breakfast but today, something really subtle,” she said.
“If carers notice a change, they go through our app, and it develops a report which can be escalated to a manager who can add in additional information about what their ‘usual’ is, that can be sent to the GP for them to pick up in language they understand exactly what’s going on, and then they can do something about it quickly.
This means they can be treated quickly and get home again quickly,” said Liz.
The Women in Innovation Award will help fund further development of her app.
“We were absolutely chuffed because it's so early on for us and it's such a renowned award for female entrepreneurs,” said Liz. “Tech in care is really coming into the main, it’s a very timely app.”
“The most important thing is that it makes people’s lives better.”