Sacramento County Grand Jury
• 2006-2007
• Agency Response
County Heat Emergency Response Issue How did the Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Service (dhhs)*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 4 findings
F1
The county could face emergencies from flood, terrorist attack, pandemic, earthquake or any number of unexpected events. After the Governor's declaration it took three days for IHSS to contact approximately 30 percent of its recipients. This result is unacceptable. IHSS has a staff of 150 and it reported that all people not on vacation were available to make calls during the emergency. Had only half of the available staff, or 75 people, along with the 20 temporary hires made just a modest ten calls per hour per person, it could potentially produce a combined total of 950 calls per hour.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
SAS should work to enhance and streamline notification efforts in a way that fully utilizes all available resources to more quickly complete emergency notifications. Coordination with other county support agencies should be improved to eliminate duplication of effort and ensure a more complete coverage of vulnerable people in the county.
F2
DHHS and SAS conducted an Emergency Operation Review after the July 2006 heat wave and identified a number of areas, both in-house and involving coordination with outside agencies, that need improvement. Among other items they specifically addressed the need to operationally define what constitutes an extreme heat situation requiring emergency response.
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
DHHS, SAS and EOO should continue to work on the problems identified during the Emergency Operation Review to better prepare the county for disasters, including heat. A specific policy should be developed to establish a level of heat, humidity and length of exposure time considered to be a heat emergency in Sacramento.
F3
SAS computers depend upon an interface with state computers and do not provide the flexibility and responsiveness required to handle an emergency.
Related Recommendations (1)
R3
SAS should expedite development of the planned ADAM computer system to provide real time recipient information for emergency notification. This information will be required to comply with the emergency plan currently being developed by EOO.
F4
The current SAS policy for allowing individuals to elect not to be notified of an impending emergency does not demonstrate a realistic understanding of an emergency situation.
Related Recommendations (1)
R4
SAS should review the policy for assigning codes to determine if allowing IHSS recipients to decline emergency notification truly serves the best interests of the recipients and the community as a whole. Since the recipient is benefiting from services paid for by public funds, SAS should contact them in any case of an emergency. Response Requirements Penal Code sections 933 and 933.05 require that specific responses to both the findings and recommendations contained in this report be submitted to the Presiding Judge of the Sacramento Superior Court by October 1, 2007, from: Sacramento County Board of Supervisors
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.