Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
Database of records, special shelters urged
By BRUCE ALPERT
Times-Picayune
WASHINGTON — After Hurricane Katrina hit, Jean Cefalu, a registered nurse from Slidell, volunteered to help elderly patients taken to the Ascension Care Center near Baton Rouge.
What she encountered, Cefalu told the Special Senate Committee on Aging on Thursday, were patients who could provide little information about what medicines and treatment they were receiving before the hurricane, thus compromising their care.
Cefalu said more electronic record-keeping is needed at nursing homes, along with a national database, complete with pictures, that facilities could use to identify displaced patients and their treatment needs.
Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., a member of the committee, said electronic record-keeping at Veterans Affairs medical centers and nursing homes enabled patients displaced by Katrina to continue with their regular care without much interruption.
Carmel Bitondo Dyer, director of the Baylor College of Medicine Geriatrics Program, said many disoriented elderly people were among the 23,000 Katrina evacuees taken to the Houston Astrodome in the days after the hurricane struck.
“The elders who had survived told us about being on I-10 for 48 hours in the hot sun, or waiting on their rooftops to be rescued,” he said. “After hearing their stories, I was certain even before it was announced that the majority of the deceased in New Orleans were elders. In Houston, more than 60 percent of the deaths were in persons over the age of 65.”
Separate senior care
Bitondo Dyer suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency consider separate shelters for elderly patients in future disasters and that a federal tracking system be established to ensure continuity of treatment and help for people trying to find displaced elderly relatives.
He told the committee about a New York nun who was visiting her hometown of New Orleans. She fractured her hip just before the hurricane and was eventually rescued from a New Orleans-area nursing home. “She was evacuated to Houston and remained delirious and incoherent due to infection,” Bitondo Dyer said.
Even though family members were looking for her across the United States, it took three frantic weeks for a relative, who works for the FBI, to find her, he said. A database could have shortened their long, painful search, he said.
Maurice Frisella, 82, who was rescued by National Guard troops along with his stepbrother as he searched for help near their French Quarter apartment three days after Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, highlighted one problem that hasn’t gotten much attention. He said that he and his stepbrother have been forced to live in nursing homes since the storm because there was no other suitable temporary housing for them.
His brother, he said, hates the food and has lost a lot of weight and now has major health problems.
Daniel Sutherland, the civil rights and civil liberties officer for the Department of Homeland Security, said many emergency shelters aren’t accessible for the disabled and elderly and that people with limited mobility often can’t get into the front door or get into the bathrooms in the mobile homes provided by FEMA.
A costly result
“The committee should be aware of one critical point: Hundreds and probably thousands of people with disabilities were evacuated to nursing homes,” Sutherland said in his written testimony. “It is completely unacceptable for people to stay in these institutionalized settings when they could be living in homes, leading independent lives. It is expensive for us as a country to have people who could live on their own instead living in costly institutionalized settings.”
A report released by the Government Accountability Office, the investigatory arm of Congress, said that some cities still haven’t developed plans to evacuate the disabled and elderly, who often need special medical equipment and more time than others to move out of harm’s way. The GAO report did not specify which cities are prepared and which are not.
Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., who presided over the hearing, said it’s important that every community develop a plan to move the elderly and disabled from nursing homes and other residences in the event of a major hurricane or terrorist attack.
“We all agree that we let down our seniors during Hurricane Katrina,” he said. “But are we ready now?”