When disasters strike, what happens to those among us with functional needs? How can they receive specialized care when their home facility can no longer support them and keep them safe?
What if this happened......
You are a long-term care facility administrator, and your building experiences a micro-burst, blowing out windows, and knocking out electricity, while the temperature outside is rising. There are heavy rains expected, and most of the buildings in the area are also suffering. You then learn that the Emergency Management Incident Commander is considering the decision to evacuate the building for safety reasons.
Now What?
What if the temperature inside the building becomes too hot (or too cold)? Is there some way to remain in the building or will residents / patients need to evacuate? Many are now becoming uncomfortable, some are beginning to panic and others are having acute health problems. Even your staff are wondering what to do. Are your generators functioning properly and do they support the most important areas of the building? What if they fail? Meanwhile, when you are considering all of this, the sewers begin to backup from the heavy rains, flooding the lower levels. Now what?
Think this won't happen? It already has, as well as a variety of other events that can be equally, or even more disastrous (see Think It Won't Happen?). What are you going to do?
Enter CHUG
If your facility was a member of CHUG, you would be part of an extensive collaboration of support that can be activated to assist your situation. Initially, CHUG would work to support sheltering-in-place. CHUG provides training for this preferred option, and is also on-call to help provide the necessary supplies needed so that patients and/or residents do not need to be moved. If the damage becomes too severe, then CHUG is ready 24/7/365 to help facilitate an evacuation. Utilizing the collaboration of member facilities, along with PPERS (transportation providers), CHUG helps facilitate the evacuation so that patients are safely moved to other member facilities, each equipped to deliver the specialized care. CHUG also ensures that patients are returned when their home facility is ready to reopen.
CHUG is on call 24/7/365 in order to respond to disasters. CHUG also trains the staff of member facilities to plan ahead for unexpected problems, (even if it is 11:00pm on Thanksgiving night) and learn how to activate the CHUG plan so that they can calmly, efficiently and safely carry-out an evacuation. We are also specialists in emergency preparedness and provide training workshops on a variety of topics related to the safety of functional needs populations.
