Home Health & Hospice Week

Disruptions won't be over right away.

If you've let your emergency preparedness plan quietly molder on a shelf, now may be the time to update it.

Many home care providers along the Gulf Coast are relying on faithful updates to their plans in the wake of Hurricane Isaac. Most home care patients decided to weather the Category 1 storm at home, according to press reports. But some of the patients who were among the more than 650,000 residents of five states who lost power were going to shelters for help with their oxygen or other equipment, reports The Times-Picayune. Of about 500 hospice patients in the New Orleans area, only a handful went to a medical shelter in Baton Rouge before the storm, the newspaper says.

At press time, Louisiana was opening more special needs shelters, said the HomeCare Association of Louisiana in a message to members. "Power outages are resulting in multiple issues related to those needing electricity for nebulizer treatments, ventilators, O2 concentrators and other electrically powered technologies," HCLA's Warren Hebert noted in the message. The state asked for help staffing the shelters.

Home care providers may see more fallout from the storm as flooding worsens and electrical outages persist. And home care workers outside of storm-affected areas could see an impact on their wallets -- higher prices at the gas pump sparked by the hurricane.