Crucial disaster prevention by home long-term care office

hope for city of peacefully living

Abstract

The action of disaster prevention in Kochi prefecture for the Nankai trough earthquake continues to progress in each area. However, elderly people do not attend the measures against the earthquake as they tend to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of scale of the disaster that they are often resigned to it. We considered that the home long-term care office which takes the central role of close community-based care of elderly people should play a more important role in disaster prevention by adopting steady efforts and never giving up in readiness against disaster brought on the community. We have been coordinating with these elderly people in training and seminars since 2015, and we went to community gatherings, elderly people's homes, and long-term care users' homes to give lectures on disaster prevention. As the results, these actions have created relationships within the elderly, building mutual trust and recognition in disaster prevention, which, in turn, also improved the skill of our staffs. Therefore, these results might induce better preparedness for the areal care system.