Education of Elderly Patients About Emergency Preparedness by Health Care Practitioners

This editorial describes the Veterans Health Administration Home-Based Care Program Patient Assessment Tool for Disaster Planning, created to address identified gaps and inconsistencies in how home health patients are educated. The tool is a simple, comprehensive checklist of relevant patient characteristics for review by any practitioner on the care team, and provides a list of preparedness education items that should be covered by the practitioner with the patient.