Emergency Preparedness For Older Adults

An emergency plan built for a household of healthy twenty-somethings doesn’t automatically work for a household that includes an older adult. The gaps usually show up in four places: medicine, mobility, transportation and communication. None of those assume a fixed level of independence — a plan has to work whether the older adult in the house lives alone and drives themselves, or relies on a caregiver for daily support. This page walks through how to coordinate all four without guessing, and ends with a one-page worksheet you can fill in today.

Why This Isn’t a Generic Checklist

FEMA’s Ready Campaign built a specific three-step framework for older adults: assess your needs, make a plan, and engage your support network. That order matters. Skipping straight to a shopping list of gear means buying things before you know what you’re actually solving for. The sections below follow that same assess-then-plan structure, applied to the four coordination points that cause the most confusion: medicine, mobility, transport and communication.

Medicine and Medical Supplies

Start with what keeps daily routines running. Ready.gov’s older-adult guidance calls for including medicines, medical supplies, batteries and chargers in an emergency supply kit, tailored to individual needs rather than a generic list. Two steps make this usable in an actual emergency instead of just theoretical:

Write down current medications, dosages and prescribing providers somewhere that travels with the household — not just in a pillbox at home.
Make copies of Medicaid, Medicare and other insurance cards, and keep them with that list, per Ready.gov’s recommendation.

If the older adult in your household undergoes routine treatment through a clinic or hospital — dialysis, infusion therapy, oxygen refills — Ready.gov recommends finding out that provider’s emergency plan in advance and identifying a backup provider now, before an outage or evacuation forces the question.

Mobility and Transportation

This is where plans built for fully independent households fall apart fastest. Ready.gov’s guidance is direct: plan for transportation if help evacuating is needed, and plan how assistive devices — a wheelchair, walker, cane or oxygen equipment — will travel with the person during an evacuation, not get left behind in the rush.

Identify who provides transportation if the older adult can’t evacuate independently, and have a backup in case that first person is unavailable.
Confirm in advance that any assistive device has a clear path to travel with them — in the vehicle, on the mobility aid itself, or packed as part of the go-bag.
Work out what special assistance the household actually needs and build it into the plan now. Ready.gov points specifically to its disability-planning guidance for households where that applies in more detail than this page covers.

Communication

Ready.gov frames this simply: plan how you will communicate if you have a communications need. That covers two different things — staying informed, and staying reachable.

Staying informed: Ready.gov recommends keeping a NOAA Weather Radio tuned to your local emergency station and downloading the FEMA app for weather alerts. If your household already has a reference on radios that keep working when cell towers go down, this is the section where that gear earns its place.
Staying reachable: make sure at least one person in the support network knows how to reach the older adult, and that the older adult has a way to reach them — written down, not just saved in a phone that might lose power.

Build the Support Network — Don’t Assume One Level of Independence

Ready.gov’s guidance here is specific enough to act on directly: at least one person in the support network should have an extra key to the home, know where emergency supplies are kept, and know how to use lifesaving equipment or administer medicine if needed. Ready.gov’s general plan-making guidance echoes the same idea from a different angle: tailor the plan to specific daily living needs and responsibilities, and discuss how people in the network can assist each other with things like communication or operating medical equipment.

That’s a meaningfully higher bar than “someone will check in,” and it doesn’t assume the older adult needs full-time support — the same network applies whether they’re fully self-sufficient day to day or rely on regular caregiving. What changes is how much of the plan that network actually has to execute.

Don’t forget pets or service animals in this coordination — not every shelter accepts them, so that needs its own alternative. If your household already has pets, our guide to emergency water storage for pets covers how to keep that supply separate from the rest of the household’s.

The Household Decision Worksheet

Use this to sort what needs to happen now from what can wait. Fill it in as a household, with the older adult directly involved in the decisions that affect them.

Immediate actions (do this week):

Write down current medications, dosages and prescribing providers; keep a copy with the go-bag and one with a support-network contact.
Copy Medicaid, Medicare and other insurance cards; store with the medication list.
Name a primary and backup transportation contact for evacuation.
Confirm how assistive devices will travel during an evacuation.
Identify the support-network member who holds a spare key and knows where supplies and lifesaving equipment are kept.

Information to gather (before you buy anything):

Call any routine-treatment provider (dialysis, infusion, oxygen supplier) and ask what their emergency plan is, and who their backup is.
If the household depends on Social Security or other regular benefits, check whether they’re set up for electronic deposit — Ready.gov notes a disaster can disrupt mail service for days or weeks.
If disability-related needs apply, review Ready.gov’s dedicated planning guidance for the details this page doesn’t cover.

Purchases to defer:

Specialized mobility or medical backup equipment — research the actual need first; this worksheet is what defines that need, not a gear list.
Anything marketed as a transportation or rescue guarantee. No product replaces having a named person and a named backup.

A Few Limits Worth Noting

This page can’t tell you what your household’s specific needs are — that’s genuinely different from one household to the next, which is why the assessment step comes first. Nothing here is a guarantee of transport, rescue or priority restoration of services; local emergency management and official alerts decide what’s actually happening during an event, not a preparedness article. Anything involving medication, a medical condition or treatment coordination should be confirmed directly with the relevant clinician or provider, not substituted with general guidance like this.