Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary

About 80% of older adults have at least one chronic condition that makes them more vulnerable than healthy people during a disaster. These chronic conditions - combined with the physiological, sensory, and cognitive changes experienced as part of aging - result in frail older adults having special needs during emergencies. Planning and coordination among public health and emergency preparedness professionals and professionals who provide services for the aging are essential to meet these special needs. Several tools and strategies already exist to help prepare these professionals to protect and assist older adults during a disaster. These include having professionals from diverse fields work and train in coalitions, ensuring that advocates for older adults participate in community-wide emergency preparedness, and using community mapping data to identify areas where many older adults live.

/pdf/disaster-preparedness-and-the-chronic-disease-needs-of-39vds2g9hv.pdf

Disaster Preparedness and the Chronic Disease Needs of Vulnerable Older Adults

About 80% of older adults have at least one chronic condition that makes them more vulnerable than healthy people during a disaster. These chronic conditions — combined with the physiological, sensory, and cognitive changes experienced as part of aging — result in frail older adults having special needs during emergencies. Planning and coordination among public health and emergency preparedness professionals and professionals who provide services for the aging are essential to meet these special needs. Several tools and strategies already exist to help prepare these professionals to protect and assist older adults during a disaster. These include having professionals from diverse fields work and train in coalitions, ensuring that advocates for older adults participate in community-wide emergency preparedness, and using community mapping data to identify areas where many older adults live.

Peer Reviewed: Disaster Preparedness and the Chronic Disease Needs of Vulnerable Older Adults

Surface water flooding risk to urban communities: Analysis of vulnerability, hazard and exposure

Floods, windstorms, drought and wildfires have major implications for human health. To date, conceptual advances in analysis of vulnerability and adaptation to climatic hazards from the environmental and social sciences have not been widely applied in terms of health, though key progress is being made particularly in relation to climate change. This paper seeks to take this conceptual grounding further, examining how key themes relate to health concerns, exploring connections with existing health literatures, and developing an organising framework to aid analysis of how vulnerability to health impacts varies within society and how actors make decisions and take action in relation to climatic hazards and health. Social science research on this theme is challenging in part because of the complex mechanisms that link hazard events to health outcomes, and the many-layered factors that shape differential vulnerability and response within changing societal and environmental contexts (including the dual effect of hazards on human health and health systems, and the combination of ‘external’, ‘personal’ and ‘internal’ elements of vulnerability). Tracing a ‘health impact pathway’ from hazard event through health risk effects to health outcomes can provide a research tool with which to map out where the different factors that contribute to vulnerability/coping capacity come into effect.

Health and climatic hazards: Framing social research on vulnerability, response and adaptation

Purpose :T o identify the vulnerabilities of elderly to disasters, and to develop strategies to address these vulnerabilities. Methods :A relevant literature search of journal articles, government training materials, news reports, and materials from senior organizations was conducted. Results: The vulnerability of the elderly to disasters is related to their impaired physical mobility, diminished sensory awareness, chronic health conditions, and social and economic limitations that prevent adequate preparation for disasters, and hinder their adaptability during disasters. Frail elderly, those with serious physical, cognitive, economic, and psycho-social problems, are at especially high risk. Conclusions: This segment of the population is growing rapidly. Therefore, it is important that emergency management recognize the frail elderly as a special needs population, and develop targeted strategies that meet their needs. Several management strategies are presented and recommendations for further action are proposed.

/pdf/frail-elderly-as-disaster-victims-emergency-management-2oht7kdngw.pdf

Frail Elderly as Disaster Victims: Emergency Management Strategies

IntroductionDuring disasters, large numbers of people with no pre-planned role arrive at the scene to offer assistance. "Convergence," which is mass movement or attempted movement towards a disaster site, is not a new phenomenon. In his dissertation, Samuel Prince described the convergence of people and supplies in response to the 1917 Halifax shipping explosion. 1 This same phenomenon was recently observed after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005. Although estimates of the number of volunteers are pending for these events, other recent disasters document substantial volunteer response. After the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, ten percent of the population (over two million people) assisted others. 2 In 1989, sixty percent of the population of San Francisco and seventy percent of the population in Santa Cruz, California responded to the Loma Prieta Earthquake. 3 Following 9/11, over 40,000 unsolicited volunteers arrived at Ground Zero in New York. 4Volunteers* can be a significant resource of timely manpower, skills, and abilities, while providing valuable insight on a community's needs. Often, volunteer assistance is important because it can be quickly provided by people living or working close to damaged areas. Especially in the case of collapsed structures, the actions of volunteers can save lives. 5 Volunteers can also augment emergency staff with basic skills and support activities, allowing responders to focus their efforts on specialized work. 6 Volunteers may bring skills that are lacking or provide them at an economic savings. Florida emergency management professionals determined that the economic advantages alone are significant enough to justify making volunteers a part of emergency plans, and regularly incorporate them during hurricane clean-up. 7 In addition to helping others, some believe that participating in volunteer service is helpful to disaster victims. Volunteerism has been suggested as an avenue to reduce stress, as an outlet for rage, as part of the healing process, and as a means of empowering victims. 8[ *Volunteers can be categorized by their relationship with the incident command system. Volunteers on an assigned resource have a specific assignment within the incident command system (e.g. a volunteer member of a rescue squad). Recruited volunteers are personally requested by the incident command system to assist in the effort due to their unique and needed skills (e.g. an owner/operator of rare equipment needed for search operations). Spontaneous volunteers are not on assigned resource nor have they been specifically recruited (e.g. a citizen that wishes to help by distributing supplies). Spontaneous volunteers agree to provide service without additional or specific compensation. Unless otherwise noted, the term 'volunteer' is used generically in this paper to refer to individuals and groups that were spontaneous or recruited. ]Although the media often present volunteer efforts as exclusively positive, serious issues and risks are commonly associated with massive convergence. Spontaneous volunteers can actually hinder disaster response by creating health, safety, and security issues, distracting responders from their duties, and interfering with response operations. Volunteer efforts can be ineffective because organizations and management systems have not prepared for nor considered how to integrate the volunteer resources. As a result, response personnel are diverted from their primary duties to consider how spontaneous volunteers will be used, to create and assign tasks, to manage logistics related to volunteers, and to supervise actions. This commonly occurs in an ad hoc manner and because of that can be very inefficient. 9 Large numbers of volunteers can overwhelm the capacity of an unprepared organization to effectively engage them. …

Lauren S. Fernandez

Papers

Frail Elderly as Disaster Victims: Emergency Management Strategies

Strategies for Managing Volunteers during Incident Response A Systems Approach