Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness

Chapter 8 Self-Help Tools for Older Persons and Their Caregivers 149
by Boy Scout troops, hospitals, Area Agencies of Aging, and fire departments
are available for review.
Medical alert services, of which Lifeline® is the best recognized, are
telephone-based systems designed to summon help for homebound people
who are injured and unable to help themselves. In the event of a fall or
other emergency, the wearer pushes a button to activate a telephone call
to an agency, which summons local assistance previously identified by the
person in distress. This system is designed to extend the social network
of isolated older persons through technology. Even though there are no
research papers studying its effectiveness, many copycat programs have
been developed, suggesting a demand for such programs. What amount
of the demand is from concerned family members rather than the users
themselves is undocumented.
Another person-centered tool, endorsed by the Red Cross Web site
(http://www.redcross.org/general/0,1082,0_91_4440,00.html), is the emergency
preparedness kit. The Web site provides instructions on creating
kits for several different populations. None are specifically for older persons,
but there is an ability to mix and match components. Emergency kits
for older persons should be compact, light, and user specific (Tumosa,
2004). They must contain at least one week’s worth of medications, information
about health care and social contacts, and safety products like flashlights,
name badges, and reflectors. The Red Cross in St. Louis, Missouri,
has developed a peer group train-the-trainer program where older persons
educate other groups of older persons on how to assemble such kits.
A quality improvement study that looked at the effectiveness of a Gateway
Geriatric Education Center train-the-trainer model for encouraging
the production of these kits uncovered an unexpected patient outcome
(Bales & Tumosa, 2009). Those who received the training were given two
kits: one to use when training others and the other to give to an older
person of their choice. Nine months later, the trainers reported that the
recipients of their kits used them when they went to emergency shelters
during three extended power outages. In addition, the trainers themselves
reported using their training kits in order to feel more secure when traveling
back and forth to work on icy roads during those times of crisis. This
suggests that the presence of the kits increased confidence in personal
safety.
One resource that can be used to encourage older persons to use selfhelp
tools is the public service announcement (PSA). A very effective
use of PSAs has been developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) (2009). The VA is distributing to its veterans, of which over