Learn about how to prepare for disasters to keep your loved ones safe.
https://www.cdc.gov/aging/emergency-preparedness/index.html
This has a list of resources at the bottom that I found very helpful.
Welcome to knowledge for caregivers. My name is Kathy, the host of this podcast. I have been a geriatric nurse for the past 10 years, I am going to share with you the knowledge that I have learned helping seniors age in place. This is the same knowledge that I use to take care of my own age loved ones. I hope you can use this knowledge to help your own age loved ones aged with dignity, and grace.
Welcome back. Today I want to talk about disaster preparedness. You may go What am I talking about? I was sitting in a classroom, they were giving us a lecture about how to deal with disasters. I don't know if you guys remembered but a while back a long time ago, we had a hurricane called Katrina, it made the news because it came to New Orleans, which is a very populated city below sea level. And a lot of areas flooded. A lot of people had to be rescued literally from their rooftops with nothing but their clothes on. These people were then flown literally all around the country, because they, you know, didn't have anywhere else to take them. So they wanted to spread them out so that each different place could take good care of these people. The guy giving the lecture was from the Disaster Relief Program here where I live, he said people were coming off the plane, and they didn't even know what medications they took, they literally, were going through a book that had pictures of different medications, to try to see if they could identify what medications people took. This then brings me back to why it is so important to have a plan for disaster.
The other reason I bring this up is I was talking to a daughter, she was talking about her mom having dementia the kids now don't live close by. We were just talking and I said why don't you get some home based services because mom was getting more nervous to drive beyond just a very small part of her neighborhood. I said you're going to need to know her medication or insurance. And you know, of course, she didn't have that information because her mom manages it. And that's what I was like, well, maybe this is a good time to ask her what her medications are. In my show notes, I'm going to link to the Centers of Disease Control, or the National Institute of Health here in the United States. They have different pages and resources that you can read about disaster planning. So I'm not going to just you know, read exactly what they do. The other thing that they have is some forms that you can go through. And it is basic information that you should have written down about your loved ones, everything from who is their health care provider, what medications they are on, what insurance Do they have that matters if you live in United States, who is their insurance carriers for various things, if they're on Medicare, sometimes they have a supplement that pays for what Medicare doesn't pay for. Sometimes they have a medication plan. So there's all different kinds of things that are important to know if a person is in a disaster, and they have to leave their home, and you don't know what their insurance is, or anything like that. And maybe they cannot get their paperwork out with them.
When we look at disasters. The first thing we need to know is what kind of disasters happen where my loved one lives. I live in the middle of the country. We pretty much have a little bit of everything. But one big thing that we have is tornadoes. Most people here in this part of the country cannot have basements we have like weird soil and you can't build basements. basements are the safest place to go in a tornado. Most of us then have storm shelters mines built in my garage, but you have to go down some very steep steps. A couple years ago, I had toe surgery, I was on crutches, and the tornado sirens went off. So here I am trying to bounce down the steps with my crutches and then you know, crawl back up and I'm grabbing my medicine and my computer. Those are my two most important things, my purse, my computer and my medicine because it seems like that's what I have to have to survive. And then my husband is a meteorologist. So he's checking the weather to make sure everything is okay. I have a lot of older people, they have those underground storm shelters, they're not going to be able to get down it. So now they're having to look at above ground shelters. Some people say they are not as safe, but they are definitely better than nothing. So many people have built in above ground shelter, or they have invested in a reinforced room. So that's one thing to know what kind of
disasters can happen. The other thing that can happen here in the middle of the country is an ice storm. Last year, we had an ice storm in the middle of October, and we still had leaves on all the trees. That's what made that ice storm so bad. So so many branches broke, and everyone lost power. Fortunately, I live in a new neighborhood, when we lose power Tuesday, a couple hours, this was the first time that we lost power for almost 14 hours. Many of my clients have either air beds, air beds, or beds that the mattresses have air that moves up and down. When it loses power, it just goes flat onto a hard bed. So if they're without power for a certain amount of time, they're gonna have a bedsore than outside people on oxygen. Nowadays, we don't bring in these huge oxygen tanks, we have what's called a concentrator, a concentrator is really cool, because it just pulls the oxygen from the air, and then gives it to you in whatever form that you need. That's a very convenient way to have oxygen in your house without having to bring in these huge tanks like they used to in the old days. But again, it relies on electricity. We were without power for almost, for us, it was only a day. But some people in Oklahoma, it was all to three weeks. So now you've got to imagine your loved one living without power. How are they going to get their meals? Do they have medical equipment that requires electricity, for instance, I have many people that also have electric wheelchairs, that means that they have to plug their wheelchair into the wall at night when they're sleeping so that they have enough charge in their battery to use it during the day. So when we look at disaster preparedness, and I'm not going like I said read everything but the things that you want to look at Mike first said was what kind of disasters happen in the area?
The other thing to look at when you're looking at disasters are fire a fire in the home? When's the last time you went through your loved ones home and made sure all the smoke detectors were working? And then talk to your family members? If they're in which room? How are they going to get out? If you have a spouse taking care of a family member? How are they going to get them out? Do you have some type of identification, some people are nervous to put identification on a window, because then that also becomes a magnet for thieves to say, Oh, this person is disabled, they won't be able to fight back. So it's kind of a little bit of a tricky situation, you need to be able to at least identify where a person is at in a fire, then you need to look at your you know risks, what kind of things are going to hinder you from being able to either, like I said, Get into a storm shelter, get out of the house in case of a fire or deal with lack of electricity. The other thing that you have to look at is evacuations. Again, we talked about Katrina, there was a very sad story about a nursing home, you know, they did not evacuate the people and the floodwaters came in and then you have all these very feeble people and not enough staff and ways to get them out. Then in that same year, there was a hurricane that came towards another city in Houston. And a lot of people didn't know about this one because it didn't cost the same amount of damage. Well, at that point nursing homes didn't want to be liable. So they put everybody on a bus, and they evacuated them. Well, many of these older people had oxygen tanks with them. And something happened, a spark happened and that bus caught on fire. So that also was a tragedy. So don't think about disasters, like Oh, they just live in a home. They live in a facility, ask them what their disaster plan is and what they're going to need where you live, you may have to go and help your loved one.
So when you're looking at disaster planning, you want to know what the local resources are. How far are they from a fire department, police department who's their doctor? Where are the closest hospitals? Who were you going to call? Do they have some neighbors that you feel like you can trust to help them? Things like locksmith if they can't get back into their house? The power person, the water person Poison Control animal control the vet, what are they going to do with their pets, if they have to get out of the house in a hurry. I know that we have one dog and three rabbits, we're probably not going to be able to get them all out. You know, we've kind of looked at, you know, who's going to go with us, our dog, we're trying to train him so that he will go down in the storm shelter. He doesn't really like it.
The next thing is to think of a plan based on like I said loss of power because of an ice storm. And when you think about an ice storm, we had caregivers that could not get to some people's houses in the middle of this ice storm and these people were very dependent on their caregivers to take care of them. They literally could not miss a day of having a caregiver at their house. In your plan. You need to think about everything that you're going to do and how you're going to communicate with them.
each other and who to call. So you don't want all five kids calling mom at one time tying up the phone lines,
making an emergency kit. So you want to look for things like their medications, their some water, some food, some spare clothing, what are they going to take with them. And you can go through lists on that, and just have some bags ready. I know one family, they had a bag and they said, Go into this inner room, if there's a tornado and take these things with you, again, we talked about get connected to the neighbors, find out who they are. Look at extreme temperatures, those can be real silent killers for the older people, especially if you live in a place that normally doesn't get really cold or doesn't get really hot. And so you don't really have a lot of either heat or air conditioning, need to think of where they can go if the heat is really bad. This is something that we've definitely had people pass away from because of the extreme elements. So I'm not here to try to scare you about disasters. I'm just here to say, think about where they live, what disasters can happen. Are they in a flooding zone? Are they in a zone with firefight fires nearby? Let's say it's near forest and there's dry kindling. And it's a drought year, that type of stuff, have a plan in place of who's going to get mom and dad out. If they don't drive. You can also go to the Red Cross and they have disaster preparedness material there and it just talks about different things. So these are things that you can bring up with your loved one, to just say, hey, in the situation, what are you going to do? Thank you for listening. I hope this has been helpful as you go through the process of taking care of a loved one and keeping them safe when we do face natural disaster.
If you have found this information helpful, feel free to share it with someone else. If you wish to contact me you can at info at Cathy's consulting.com that is I NF o at symbol KATHYSCONSUL t i n g.com. I welcome any comments. Remember, this podcast is meant for informational purposes only, and not to replace the advice of your medical professionals.