✨Safety and Emergency Management

I chair our community's safety advisory committee which includes three staff members and fifteen residents. The discussion in this forum has motivated our committee to rethink how we educate residents in independent living about being ready for emergencies. We realized that most would not have given much thought to being prepared or how to react in the first minutes of an emergency. Using AI and prompting it extensively from my personal experience, I produced the attached draft.

Please feel free to take it and discuss what it contains in your community. If you have suggestions and comments please share them here in this forum. When our handbook is finalized, I plan to share it here.

Richmond Shreve

NaCCRA Board Member & VP

Forum Moderator

Richmond,

Have you been using AI to do research and to create/build your document?

Linda Kilcrease

Resident of a CCRC

Yes. I use ChatGPT and I have a paid subscription. It is a productivity booster, but one must treat it like a very eager and resourceful assistant with good language skills, an overconfident one without wisdom or self-awareness. It often adds needed detail and good analytical suggestions, and occasionally it is very wrong.

The AI models are designed to have personality and to be supportive and flattering. It's important to be mindful that there is no human intellect there, it's a word processor that completes ideas not just words. There is an skill to prompting and conversing AI that's learned.

Richmond Shreve

NaCCRA Board Member & VP

Forum Moderator

Thanks for sharing this document, Richmond. I assume that in your state, just like here in Oregon, IL is governed by different rules than the licensed AL, MC and SN when it comes to evacuation and dealing with emergencies.

Susan Farkas

The IL regulations differ, or may be entirely absent. But the principle of residents being responsible for themselves is universal. Especially during the first minutes of an emergency, having a plan can make a big difference in the outcome. SN and AL involve people who are expressly NOT independent and the staff must manage the emergency. But even those residents include people who are able to take some measures without help, freeing staff to deal with those who can't help themselves.

Richmond Shreve

NaCCRA Board Member & VP

Forum Moderator

A resident team of Independent Living at Panorama are continually building on and improving our disaster preparedness documents. Attached is our latest version of Surviving the Unexpected, a document that is distributed to every Independent Living household. Because we live in an earthquake-prone area, earthquake is probably the most likely disaster we face and by all accounts the West Coast is overdue for "the big one."

Residents are encouraged to be prepared to be self-sufficient for at least two weeks. We face challenges in motivating our neighbors to take this risk seriously but we do try to have neighborhood meetings, and we have semi-annual "disaster expo" type events where we talk about the importance of Being Prepared in many different ways as well as share examples of products for food and water storage, for example. In our planning for the next "disaster expo" we are looking at how we might better motivate our neighbors to prepare to take care of themselves. We have lots of ideas and examples for resources to help in being prepared, and we are still a bit short on the motivation side. That is a work in process!

Sorry forgot attachment