Public health experts are trying to get the word out about a program aimed at ensuring seniors are prepared if and when a disaster strikes.
Disaster PrepWise is a free online tool used to assist older adults in creating a personalized disaster preparedness plan. Research for the program started about a decade ago, based on a similar program in California for children with disabilities or special needs. Dr. Sato Ashida, professor at the University of Iowa, whose passion is seniors, felt like there was an opening for a program to work similarly with that cohort.
Nick Ostrem, project coordinator, said the reason behind that focus is twofold.
“Seniors tend to be more affected by disasters when they happen. They have more health needs, more needs for daily life, and so those are the things that would get interrupted when a disaster happen,” he said. “Initially, when doing the research, they also found that seniors were less likely to have plans.
“If they’re more likely to be affected and less likely to have plans, that’s a vulnerable population. There’s a need there.”
After getting through the research phase, the University is now working to get the word out about the program. Though emergencies are easy to write off as something that just happens to somebody else, ensuring that there’s a plan in place can be crucial.
“A lot of people think about it in the abstract,” Ostrem said. “It’s something where everybody has a story about a disaster happening to somebody they know, but it could very easily be them this winter…Being prepared is one of the most important things you can do.”
There are five steps to the program’s process.
1. Complete a personal and household assessment.
2. Develop a personal emergency network.
3. Gather emergency information and important documents.
4. Keep a three-to-five-day supply of medications/medical supplies, including talking with their providers for medications or situations where that can get a little more complicated.
5. Build two emergency supply kits, one for home and one for on the go.
When constructing a plan, it’s tempting to think for the best-case scenario when making preparations, but doing the opposite can be beneficial.
“When you’re thinking about assessing your health needs, you want to think about what’s going to happen on a day where your leg is acting up or your eyesight is cloudy that day. You want to prepare for the worst-case scenario because it’s better to overprepare than under prepare,” Ostrem said.
It becomes even more important for those dealing with health conditions.
“Whether you have diabetes, or some sort of mobility condition, or a communication condition or something more complicated, like cancer, those are things that you need to plan for,” Ostrem said. “If you have a health condition, then you have things that you do to manage that condition, you have things you do to treat that condition and you want to make sure that they stay the same after something happens.”
Disaster PrepWise training is available for individuals, where they can meet with a trained team member to build a personalized disaster plan or individuals can make their plan in a group session. Training is also offered for organizations to train people or to have someone give presentations about the program or general emergency preparedness. The program has worked with counties, like Johnson and Linn, as well as other groups, like Iowa Legal Aid.
“We will go pretty far to help people,” Ostrem said, with the team size scaling up as they work to expand the reach of the program.
For more information about the program, Ostrem can be reached at 319-946-1193 or by email at [email protected].