Toolkit |

Building Resilience in Older Adults

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Table of Contents

This toolkit aims to bring together organizations involved in aging-in-place support and disaster resilience efforts to improve the resilience of older adults. The increasing frequency and intensity of weather-related and other disaster events combined with the growing representation of older adults in the overall population have created a new environment in which public health programs and policies will need to actively promote the resilience of the older population.

This toolkit contains information and activities that can bring together those involved in aging-in-place support and those involved in disaster resilience efforts to improve the resilience of older adults to natural and human-caused disasters.

Two companion documents (a report and a proposed journal article — the manuscript is available the authors upon request) provide additional background for those interested in how the toolkit was created. To inform development of this toolkit, RAND researchers conducted interviews with public health department staff, village executive directors, and age-friendly community coordinators across the country (Shih et al., 2018).

The contents of this toolkit will be of particular interest to political leaders (e.g., mayors' offices); emergency preparedness, response, and management staff; health departments at the local, state, and national levels; and leaders of age-friendly communities and villages.

This research was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through contract 200-2014-59627 and conducted within RAND Health. For more information on RAND Health, see www.rand.org/health or contact the director at RAND_Health@rand.org.

Toolkit at a Glance

  • Step: 01. Overview and Goals

    This step reviews toolkit audience and goals and offers tips for using the toolkit effectively.

  • Step: 02. Finding Common Ground

    This step prompts you to develop a goal, specific desired outcomes, relevant program activities to reach the goal, and a logic model that displays all these elements.

  • Step: 03. Improving Resilience

    This step guides you through the best available research evidence on building CEP to help you select an EBPH approach.

  • Step: 04. Evaluating Efforts

    This step provides a structure to determine whether the program you identified during GTO Step 3 is appropriate for your target, community, and organization.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the villages, age-friendly communities, and public health departments that participated in this study. We would also like to thank Boyer Bazelias, Clara Aranibar, Nina Ryan, and Chanel Skinner for their help in managing the survey and scheduling the interviews, as well as our colleagues Rodney Harrell at AARP, Natalie Galucia at Village to Village Network, Gail Kohn and Nick Kushner at Age-Friendly DC, and Laura Biesiadecki and Geoffrey Mwaungulu at the National Association for County and City Health Officials for their input and their help with recruiting interviewees. Thanks to Jaime Madrigano from RAND and Jonathan Adriano from the East Central Health District in Augusta, Georgia, who reviewed this toolkit and provided ideas and guidance that have helped us to improve its clarity and practicality. In addition, we would like to thank Amy Wolkin, the Vulnerable Populations Officer in the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for her thoughtful review of the toolkit and Gregg Stickeler, John Roses, and Jeanne Haskell at the Interviewing Services of America for their survey support. Finally, we would like to thank the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for funding the study that made this work possible.

Up Next:

Step 01. Overview and Goals

This step reviews toolkit audience and goals and offers tips for using the toolkit effectively.

View Step