A message from Marie Van Brittan Brown

Struggling to read the text in the image on this page? Here is what it says:

I am Marie Van Brittan Brown and I was born on 30th October 1922. I lived in Jamaica, Queens, New York and I died on 2nd February 1999.

My husband was an electrician and I was a nurse and there was many times when I was home alone with my 2 children. The crime rate was very high where I lived and it took ages for the police to arrive when called!

I invented a security system. It had four peepholes, a sliding camera, TV monitors and microphones which allowed me to see who was at my door and talk to them without opening it. This made me feel safer when I was home alone as I no longer had to open the door to see who was there. 

I wanted to make this available to others but I was unable to sell it to as it was just too expensive to install.

I evaluated my invention and looked at how I could improve it further and found that whilst adding a door unlock option just by the click of a button gave me extra security I realised that this didn't help to improve the response rate of the police.

I realised that if I could open the door by clicking a button then maybe I could develop something that contacted emergency services in the same way.

Today my invention is known as a home or office security system—I cant believe how much they have evolved from my simple idea!

Contact the Transformation & Improvement Team on dhcft.transformation@nhs.net to see how Derbyshire Healthcare’s continuous improvement journey is developing.