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Lindsay J Peterson, Three Decades of Research Guiding Policy and Policy Guiding Research: Academic Efforts Concerning Aging and Public Policy, Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 33, Issue 1, 2023, Pages 13–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prac031
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Ten days after Hurricane Irma struck Florida in 2017 with the power to knock out electrical service nearly statewide and prompt millions of people to evacuate, Dr. Kathryn Hyer sat before Senator Susan Collins’ Special Senate Committee on Aging. A professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida (USF), she urged the panel to pay more attention to the effects of disasters on older adults, require greater oversight of disaster planning in long-term care, and invest more in geriatric education (Disaster Preparedness and Response, 2017). Her statement reflected more than a decade of research that began with a string of hurricanes that traversed Florida in the summer of 2004 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated parts of Louisiana and Texas in 2005.
This work linked the USF School of Aging Studies and health service researchers at Brown University on a National Institute on Aging–funded grant that aimed to examine what happens to residents of nursing homes (NHs) in the path of a major hurricane. Among their findings: these residents are more likely to die or be hospitalized in the weeks and months after a hurricane, even up to 90 days afterward, and their risks are greater if they are evacuated (Dosa et al., 2012).
