Developing An Emergency Plan
Posted by Donna Mae Scheib on June 27, 2019
Developing An Emergency Plan
When you think of an emergency plan, you probably think of various steps you have prepared to take in the event of a disaster such as a fire or a storm, or becoming the victim of an accident or crime. These plans typically stay the same as we age, but senior citizens in particular face a new set of concerns: the health and dependency needs that eventually necessitate that they move into a senior living facility. Falls, strokes, heart attacks, and other health emergencies become very real possibilities. For the adult children of senior citizens, considered a part of the often overworked “sandwich generation” if they have children of their own, making an emergency plan with their parents is crucial.
The adult children of senior citizens often find themselves in the position of making crucial decisions on their parents’ behalf for the sake of their health and wellbeing. Advance medical directives such as a living will or durable power of attorney for healthcare may relay instructions for a patient’s preferred treatment or give their child (or other loved ones) the power to give these instructions as their surrogate, respectively. These documents, as well as a durable power of attorney for finance, go into effect when the bearer loses the ability to make their own decisions –a common result of physical health crises or mental conditions such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. When aging parents and their children create an emergency plan together, then, they ask important questions and make important compromises regarding the parent’s independence and their child’s responsibilities.
That said, successful emergency plans leave the adult child’s priorities and schedules far more organized than if an emergency had struck them unprepared. They allow senior citizens to be much more assured of their health and safety. This article explains why and how you should prepare an emergency plan for your aging parents, or encourage others to do the same.
Why You Should Make an Emergency Plan?
Emergency plans can mean the difference between safety and worst case scenarios for seniors and prepare their adult children to help while still managing their own schedules and stress. For starters, the conversation can clear up any uncertainty about the parent’s wishes that may have otherwise arisen if they became incapacitated suddenly. The organization of affairs can allow seniors to come to terms with changes in their daily lives, and prepare their adult children psychologically to take on more responsibilities and keep their priorities straight.
One Forbes article on the topic of senior emergency plans features an anecdote about the difficulties of facing an emergency without a plan. In this anecdote, a retired woman living in an apartment suffered a fall and her son, who was her medical surrogate but lived many states away, took some days to meet her in the hospital –at which point they both had to discuss where she would go. As the article notes, circumstances like these are common: “fiercely independent seniors often refuse to move or allow help at home, despite the urgings of their adult children”. This refusal can have negative consequences, as the anecdote shows, and the geographical distance that many adults have from their parents makes an emergency plan especially important.
The last key reason to make an emergency plan is that seniors require more than the standard emergency protocol. A fire or extreme weather event can become much more difficult to handle, whether seniors are alone or in a living facility. There are even criminals, such as scammers and burglars, who target seniors with greater frequency. As mentioned, major health risks become more common than in youth –where they are mostly the rarer result of accident or genetics, if at all. This brings us to the next section of this article, which will discuss how to make an emergency plan based on factors in your parent’s health and environment.
How to Make an Emergency Plan?
The first step to making an emergency plan is to hold a conversation with your parent about both of your wants and needs. This discussion will likely involve consideration of worst-case scenarios peculiar to their health and safety. By the end of it, though, your parent will be able to make their wishes known regarding finances, healthcare, living situations, transportation, and other personal needs.
Common goals include staying as healthy, independent, connected to family and community, and content with their living space as possible. You can use these same conversations to start establishing documents that authorize you to carry out their wishes, such as a last will and testament, living will, durable powers of attorney for healthcare and finance, or POLST. The conversation may also determine whether they should pursue care management, assisted living, and other changes in the living situation.
The second step to an emergency plan, and the step that makes it a proper plan on paper is to create a checklist of all important documents and organize them in one centralized location. Besides the legal documents mentioned above, these may include lists of medications, address books covering social and medical contacts, passports, birth certificates, social insurance, funeral instructions, medical insurance plans, and organ donor cards. The central location where they keep all of these documents should be an accessible area of their living space, as emergency responders will need to be able to see the medical ones in order to abide by their wishes. They should also take the documents anywhere else they stay.
Some steps to emergency plans work better for particular people. If you live far away from your parent, you may call frequently with as many in-person visits as possible to make sure they are doing well. You may invest in devices that remind them to take medication or a Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) that will send them help in an emergency. If they live in a facility, you should ask the staff if they have a successful emergency system for general environmental emergencies.
As long as an emergency plan accounts for all of a senior citizen’s opinions, you can honor your parent’s wishes with a minimal amount of stress.
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