Coordinated Regional Disaster Planning for Long-Term Care and Home Health Agencies: An Example of Strategy Development through a Data Driven Gap Analysis

John, Vishnu, AJ, Jumil, Frank, Deborah

Introduction

The elderly, infants, people with disabilities, and people with poor health status are among the most vulnerable during disasters. The City of Houston Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has annually conducted Health Care Hurricane Preparedness Summits with agencies that provide long term care and/or home health support to ensure that adequate planning occurs to protect at-risk populations, particularly for the tropical cyclone threat. The latest summit was held on April 7, 2011. To identify existing gaps in planning, participants were asked to complete previously tested organizational preparedness surveys.

Method

The select agencies attended the Health Care Hurricane Planning & Preparedness Summit in April 2011. A total of 98 agencies completed the organizational preparedness survey covering the following organizational domains: characteristics, disaster preparedness, hazard knowledge, management direction & coordination, supportive resources, protection, and emergency coping and restoration. A descriptive analysis was conducted. We calculated the preparedness scores and standardized ratio scores for each of the organizational preparedness survey domains.

Results

The results of the organizational preparedness surveys indicated that seventy one percent (71%) of the agencies identified themselves as ‘health agencies’. Nearly half of the agencies (48 %) had more than 20 employees. Nearly all had a particular person responsible for disaster planning, however, only two-thirds utilized a committee approach to address disaster planning. Nearly 92 % of the agencies reported that they had a written disaster plan. Fourteen percent reported using social media to communicate with the community. Two thirds reported that they did not have any formal or informal collaborative response agreements in place.

Intervention Strategy

Consequential to the surveys, the Houston Department of Health and Human Services (HDHHS) and the OEM formed a collaborative with other local emergency management and State health agencies, to form an all-hazards Long Term Care Home Health Emergency Management Collaborative (LTCHHEMC).

This new collaborative aspires to:

1) Build community resiliency 2) Build preparedness and response capacity, particularly in the Emergency Support Function (ESF) #8

realm

3) Collaborate and leverage capabilities, resources, and assets with our planning and response partners to best serve the emergency management interests of the Long Term Care (LTC)/Home Health (HH) community and the ESF#8 function as a whole (including initiating development of Memoranda of Agreements)

4) Develop effective communication channels with LTC and HH representatives including:5) Enhanced readiness through better understanding of emergency management systems and

processes via LTCHHEMC participation in briefings, assessments, planning, training, and exercises.

Learning objectives

i) To share gap analysis approach to identify areas for planning focus,ii) To describe the process of forming an all-hazards Long Term Care Home Health Emergency

Management Collaborative (LTCHHEMC),iii) To report the outcomes, challenges and opportunities of the program affecting

preparedness of Long Term Care Home Health service providers.