Deborah Tauscher, emergency preparedness coordinator, Mills-Peninsula Health Services
A well-stocked first aid kit is an essential staple of emergency preparedness and can help you respond quickly and effectively to injuries or emergencies. Read these tips from Deborah Tauscher, emergency preparedness coordinator at Mills-Peninsula Health Services, and Jim Schweikhard, regional health and safety manager, to help you stock the right items in your kit.
There are a wealth of ready-made, customized kits for purchase at your local pharmacy – car, baby/children, kitchen, pet, travel, burn, sports and office kits. Some are even small enough to slip in your pocket or purse. You may have many of the items in these kits in your medicine chest at home but if you’ve lost your tweezers, the pain medication has expired and you only have one Band-Aid left that won’t stick, it’s time to evaluate whether to simply replenish key items or purchase a new kit.
Do you know what you and your family will do in the case of an earthquake, fire or other disaster? Earthquakes are common in the Bay Area, but disasters of all kinds can be best navigated with an emergency plan.
Deborah Tauscher, Mills-Peninsula emergency preparedness coordinator, gives you tips on how to plan ahead in the first of a series of video segments from Healthpoint TV on emergency preparedness.
Deborah Tausher, emergency preparedness coordinator, Mills-Peninsula Health Services
In our monthly series of articles about emergency preparedness, Deborah Tauscher, emergency preparedness coordinator at Mills Peninsula Health Services, and Jim Schweikhard, Sutter Health Peninsula Coastal Region environmental health and safety manager, break down disaster preparation into manageable, monthly steps. This month’s task is to develop an evacuation plan.
Envision your escape
The first step is to look for two quick escape routes from each room in your home. In addition to the obvious exit paths, such as doorways, keep in mind that the best escape route in an emergency may be through a window. Also consider whether you will need a ladder or other special equipment to escape.
emergency preparedness coordinator, Mills-Peninsula Health Services
When you think of preparing an emergency food supply, are granola bars or freeze-dried foods in individual foil pouches the first thing that come to mind? If yes, think again. Imagine sustaining your family for any length of time on these types of foods.
To be well prepared, you should stock enough food to last your family seven to 10 days (the same counts for emergency water – see last month’s article on storing an emergency water supply). Planning and stocking up in advance will enable you to buy foods that you and your family like when they are on sale – avoiding the high cost of specialized emergency foods.
Deborah Tauscher, emergency preparedness coordinator, Mills-Peninsula Health Services
In our January blog post on Emergency Preparedness, we offered tips on creating a disaster communications plan. Having all the phone numbers at hand and ready when you need them saves time and gives some comfort knowing you know where to go and who to call.
In this February Emergency Preparedness blog post, we’ll focus on water. Recommendations for personal water storage are usually one gallon of water per person per day. For many years, the general recommendation was to prepare a water supply for 72 hours. But this recommendation has recently changed. The current recommendation is to create a 7-10 day water supply.
Emergency planning can seem overwhelming, so why not set aside just one hour each month to get prepared? By the end of the year you’ll have a well-thought out, practical plan in place.
In this series of blog posts, Deborah Tauscher, emergency preparedness coordinator at Mills-Peninsula, and Jim Schweikhard, Sutter Health Peninsula Coastal Region environmental health and safety manger, will share tips to help you prepare for disasters in easily manageable steps.
Disasters are in people’s consciousness these days. As September is National Preparedness Month, now is a great time to review and practice your preparedness plans.
On the TV news and online, we see floods, earthquakes and hurricanes and realize this could happen anywhere, anytime. It’s a reminder that we need to take steps ahead of time to prepare ourselves. It is especially important for those of us in health care to be ready to respond when our community needs us most.
Planning ahead for an emergency such as a fire or an earthquake can mean the difference between coping with disaster and falling victim to it. If a natural disaster struck today, would you be ready?
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