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You would do anything to keep your family safe, and one of the best ways to do that is to ensure they are ready to respond in the event that an emergency occurs. If you’re out of town or you’re the one who is injured, you need to make sure that your family has a plan in place to handle the situation. Below, we share some tips for creating an effective emergency response plan for your family. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but you’ll want a strong plan in place in the event that an emergency occurs.

Building A Family Emergency Response Plan

You’re not going to be able to prepare for every single type of emergency, but you can create a few different response plans that can be implemented based on the situation. For example, these three types of emergency response plans oftentimes account for a number of different types of emergencies:

• Shelter Outside The Home
• Shelter Inside The Home
• Getting Help

We’ll talk about building each one of these plans in greater detail.

Shelter Outside The Home – Every family should have an evacuation plan in the event of a fire. The main goal with this type of emergency response plan is to ensure all parties know that their goal is to find a safe way out of the house, whether that is through a door or a window. It’s also helpful to set up a family meeting location outside the home so that you can rendezvous in one place to ensure everyone made it out safely. If you live in an apartment, make sure that your family knows to take the stairs during an emergency and to avoid elevators.

Shelter Inside The Home – You should also have a plan in place to shelter inside the home in the event of an emergency like a tornado, earthquake or similar natural disaster. Get to a sheltered location on the bottom level of your residence away from the windows. It’s also helpful to put some supplies in this location that could prove useful in the event that the power is lost, like flashlights, a radio and a first-aid kit.

Getting Help – Finally, you should walk every member of your family through an emergency response in the event that you need to seek help from an adult or emergency medical services. Talk to your kids about going to a neighbor’s house to get help, and make sure that the neighbor is aware that they are part of your emergency plan. It’s also helpful to keep a list of emergency phone numbers in an easily accessible place so that your kids can call for help if there are no adults around. Teach them how to dial a number on a phone and how to access your contacts to call a specific person so that they are ready for any situation.

Practice Makes Perfect

Finally, an emergency preparedness plan is only helpful if you are ready to perform it when an emergency strikes. Don’t just talk about what should be done in the event of an emergency, physically walk through the actions. Have your kids practice getting to the rendezvous locations so that they aren’t doing it for the first time when time is of the essence.

It’s helpful to walk through the plan with your family a couple of times, but it’s also helpful to practice at least one unplanned emergency response. You don’t need to wake everyone up in the middle of the night to execute the plan, but let your family know that sometime in the next week, you’re going to call a simulated emergency, and you want them to treat it as if it was real. If your family executes the plan to perfection, you’ll be ready if an emergency strikes, and if something doesn’t go to plan, you’ll be glad you worked through the issues in a simulation so that they’ll do the right thing when it matters.

If you have questions about developing an emergency response plan, or you want to talk with a member of the Gold Cross Ambulance team, give us a call today at (920) 727-3034.

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