SECTION 1.
(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(1) Residential care facilities for the elderly are privately owned businesses providing community care to people over 60 years of age who are unable to live independently. Currently, there are approximately 7,800 residential care facilities for the elderly in California.
(2) Residents of residential care facilities for the elderly often have dementia, multiple chronic illnesses, mental illness, or disabilities or are receiving hospice services. They are often unable to walk or move without assistance. As a result, the residents are at greater risk of being unable to escape or protect
themselves during an emergency or natural disaster.
(3) Residential care facilities for the elderly may not have adequate numbers of staff to evacuate residents during an emergency, especially during the night. Consequently, if there is an emergency, residential care facilities for the elderly are likely to rely heavily on emergency response personnel who may not be familiar with the facility or the specific needs of residents.
(4) Residential care facilities for the elderly are required to maintain an emergency and disaster plan at the facility site. However, emergency response personnel may not have immediate access to this critical information, whether because the responders do not know where to locate the plan, or because the plan has been destroyed or misplaced during the emergency, or because the plan has not been updated with current resident data. Consequently, maintaining
an emergency and disaster plan in writing at the facility is not sufficient to provide emergency response personnel immediate access to critical information about the facility and its residents.
(5) Some residential care facilities for the elderly fail to update their emergency and disaster plan in a timely manner. For example, in the County of Napa, less than two years after disastrous wildfires struck the region, eight residential care facilities for the elderly did not have an updated plan available during an unannounced visit from the State Department of Social Services. The department has limited financial resources and personnel to complete annual visits to each facility in the state to ensure that the facility has an updated emergency and disaster plan.
(6) Residential care facilities for the elderly staff and residents, emergency response personnel, and the department
would all benefit from the development of an online, cloud-based emergency response system that allows first responders to access an emergency and disaster plan immediately upon receiving a call for emergency services.
(7) Requiring residential care facilities for the elderly to upload their emergency and disaster plan to the online system would protect the safety and lives of residents by ensuring that the residential care facilities for the elderly report updated plans to the department and allowing emergency response personnel to gain immediate access to the plans in the event of an emergency.
(8) The online system would enable to the department to verify the emergency and disaster plans of residential care facilities for the elderly electronically rather than in person, thereby conserving departmental resources.
(9) Technology for an online, cloud-based emergency response system is already developed and available in the private sector.
(b) It is the intent of the Legislature, in enacting this bill, to require the department, the Office of Emergency Services, and the Department of Technology, in partnership with the private sector, to develop and implement a secure online emergency management database with an emergency disaster technology tool to be maintained by the department and accessible by emergency response personnel.