Ask the Expert

Are You Prepared for Caregiving During an Emergency?

With the recent 100-year anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which devastated the San Francisco Bay Area region, we have seen a lot media attention focused on the importance of emergency preparedness. For caregivers and their loved ones, keeping calm and maintaining routines may be difficult but is nonetheless essential. Good disaster preparedness can help caregivers move through the challenges of dealing with emergency.

In times of emergency, people with dementia might not understand what is going on around them. However, they do pick up emotions and they might have partial understanding, which can lead to greater confusion. Your loved one may be more anxious, less willing to do things, more difficult to distract, and have increased sleep disturbances. Depending on the severity of the dementia, he/she might make irrelevant comments or laugh inappropriately. Since long-term memory is generally more intact, he/she might fixate on an earlier time with some similar aspects to the current situation.

Below are some tips that may help to reduce agitation for loved ones with dementia:

  • Limit TV and other news. If at all possible—and depending on the level of the dementia—it would be good to avoid having the person with dementia see the TV coverage of the event all together, including radio and newspaper coverage. Everyone should, in fact, limit the number of hours spent watching a disaster.
  • Maintain routines as much as possible. Routines are reassuring to people with dementia, and they will be calmer if their daily schedule is kept. You might find that keeping a routine is reassuring for yourself as well, allowing you to focus on tasks without too much thinking.
  • Take care of yourself. Gather whatever friends and family you have around you, and try to connect with others as much as possible. Additionally, it is important to lower your expectations of yourself, slow down, do what feels nurturing for yourself, and be very patient with yourself and your loved one. When feeling stressed, our nerves often feel raw and we might find ourselves being snappy or cranky. Forgive yourself for not being perfect; it is understandable under the circumstances.

The most important thing you can do is to have a good disaster plan at your house. Questions to consider include: Is there back-up for someone to care for your loved one in case you can't make it home? Can someone pick him/her up from daycare? Do you have an extra week of medication stored away in case you can't get to the pharmacy in an emergency? Do you keep water supplies and canned foods somewhere accessible? These are just a few things that people need to consider to be prepared for that which we cannot control or predict.

The U.S. Administration on Aging's National Family Caregiver Support Program and Caresource Healthcare Communications recently released a new consumer guide geared to help older adults and caregivers prepare for emergencies. Just in Case: Emergency Readiness for Older Adults and Caregivers includes a fact sheet and checklist with special emphasis placed on issues that affect older adults, disabled persons, and their caregivers due to medical conditions, physical challenges, assistive devices, and mobility issues.

Just in Case is available at no charge at the Aging in Stride website and on the U.S. Administration on Aging website.

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