The fall is a busy time for planning and preparation. It’s also an important time to safeguard your children in the event of an emergency. As both a mom, and an estate planning attorney, I have seen the importance of having a plan in place for emergency situations.

Parents are used to filling out emergency contact forms for their children at school. While these are a good start, they only go so far. Very often schools don’t know until the information is needed that the card is outdated.

It is essential that emergency medical information is available for your child wherever and whenever an emergency occurs. It must also contain enough information to be useful to emergency responders and other health care providers. One of the services I provide is preparing emergency action plans to be executed in the event of an emergency.

To ensure that a child’s important information is known in a medical emergency, I register many of my clients in a service that provides instant electronic access to a child’s emergency information and documents. This program provides access to information a non-parent caregiver might need in an emergency situation.

Minors Matter, provides a card that parents can give to the child’s caregivers — babysitters, grandparents, neighbors, even older siblings. The card contains important health information regarding your child’s allergies, medical conditions and pediatrician, and allows hospitals and doctors to immediately get additional, detailed emergency information about the child from the Minors Matter website or via fax. This is just one of the many components of an emergency plan which I can help you design for your family.

Parents of kids away at college also face many challenges when confronting a medical emergency. When it comes to health care, college students over 18 are legal adults, even if parents are paying their tuition and otherwise still responsible for them.

Because of the federal health care privacy law called HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), hospitals have been known to refuse to give parents any information about their child who was admitted for a medical emergency, even if the parents are out-of-state. This, naturally, leaves parents frantic.

College students can avoid this hurdle by completing a legal form called a “HIPAA release.” This allow hospitals and medical professionals to talk with parents. A HIPAA release (or healthcare power of attorney) can mean the difference between knowing what is happening with your college student in a medical emergency and being completely shut out. Helping families with Health care powers of attorney is one of my main focuses.

As with information of younger children, the HIPAA release needs to be available at the hospital to be useful. I also register many of my college student clients in a companion service called DocuBank I.C.E. (In Case of Emergency), which also includes a wallet card for the student to carry.

With both of these services, when the card is used at the hospital, parents receive an immediate alert, as well as the phone number at the hospital to call for more information.

The key to being prepared for an emergency situation is having a plan in place prior to the situation arising. I am happy to discuss with you the various options available to put an emergency plan in place for your family.