Food Allergy mom and physician Julie Brown share this little gem on Facebook not long ago: Smart911. It’s a free service that allows you provide more details regarding your household to emergency responders AHEAD OF TIME — brfore an emergency. The Smart911 website states, “Smart911 is a free service that allows citizens across the U.S. to create a Safety Profile for their household that can provide information to 9-1-1 and emergency management officials during an emergency”. Smart911 invited to create a Safety Profile that can be made available to 9-1-1 call centers that are participating in Smart911 (you can request this service to come to your area). The benefit of this service for our allergic community is to notify first responders of allergens and conditions that might conflict with medical response.
Disclaimer: I was not asked or paid by Smart911 to write about their Service. They will read this blog post about the same time you do! I felt that Julie’s facebook post was very important to share outside of our private groups.
For example, years ago there was a young boy in our local support group who had a corn allergy. Several of the medications that might be used during an emergency contain corn byproducts. Therefore, his nurse by trade mother made sure that their house location was registered with the local ambulance service as household who could not come in contact with medications containing corn. This service is longer available, so I was pleased to learn about Smart911 as an alternative. I know many in our community have allergies to sulfa drugs, corn and other drug allergies. This type of data is very important to share and have on hand. Since there is no cure, prevention and response to an emergency is the best we can do!
Be Allergy and Asthma safe and enjoy your weekend!
http://safety.smart911.com/smart911/
One of the hardest things I find about managing both life threatening food allergies and asthma is talking to others. I hate to be the one that might be perceived as demanding, pushing or for asking too much. What I now know, fourteen years later, is that honest, clear information presented with kindness works!..