NORTHAMPTON — Like most 3 a.m. calls, the news couldn’t be good.
What Mary Savarese learned May 28 was that an emergency evacuation was underway at the CareOne at Northampton healthcare facility, home of her 95-year-old mother, Ann.
Savarese went straight to the building at 548 Elm St. and found the area packed with emergency and other vehicles.
A malfunctioning electrical cord had started a small fire early that morning. No one was hurt, but the incident forced 41 residents to be relocated.
Thanks to a little-known program called the Massachusetts Long Term Care Mutual Aid Plan – or MassMAP for short – arrangements for alternate care were already being made.
MassMAP connects regional nursing homes, assisted living facilities and rest homes so they can assist each other in emergency situations. In this case, about 350 people got automated phone calls alerting them to the fire, said Scott Aronson, principal of Russell Phillips & Associates, a firm that acts as consultant to MassMAP.
“In the past, they would have had to pick up the phone and call every other nursing home to see who could take the residents, or (residents would) go to Cooley Dickinson (Hospital), who’d get slammed,” Aronson said.
After that initial call goes out, Aronson said, other healthcare facilities can respond online and provide information on resources they can offer, like transportation and beds.
According to Aronson, this meant CareOne was able to focus on helping residents rather than searching for temporary housing and vehicles.
“They’re in essence putting a post up, and then everybody is responding to the post,” he said.
Volunteers at the region’s MassMAP coordinating center in Longmeadow organize transportation and housing on the basis of those posts.
The morning of the CareOne fire, Jim Garrow, a consultant at Russell Phillips & Associates, responded to the region’s coordinating center, located at Jewish Geriatric Services. Within an hour, he said, residents who had to relocate were being loaded into wheelchair-accessible vans.
“On our end, things went very well, and on the receiving side, things went very well,” he said.
Six nearby facilities lent vans and shuttles to aid CareOne, Aronson said. They would have been able to transport as many as 72 residents, though he said only 41 were relocated – four to Cooley Dickinson for observation and 37 to CareOne at Redstone.
In addition to making transportation easier for facilities in emergencies, the help takes demand off emergency vehicles, Aronson said.
People often imagine ambulances lining up outside long-term care facilities in these situations, he said, but that’s rarely necessary.
“We’ve been pushing this nationally when we’re working with people to understand you don’t need to put residents in an ambulance – you can put them in wheelchair-accessible vehicles and shuttles,” he said.
Residents from CareOne at Northampton have all returned to the building, said Dave Carboneau, the administrator of the Northampton center. He declined to comment further, saying, “They don’t let us make statements at the building level.”
Savarese, who lives in Northampton, said she was impressed by how quickly repairs had been done on the building, and she said her mother remained calm throughout the ordeal.
Her mother’s biggest concern, she said, was with the availability of CareOne’s on-site amenities: “She just kept on asking me, ‘When does the beauty salon reopen?’”