With the cold and flu season fast approaching, the University of
Pittsburgh at Bradford’s Outreach Services is offering a free
caregiving class designed to prepare participants to care for an
ill family member at home.

The classes – slated for Thursday at Kane Area High School and
Sept. 27 at the Seneca Building in Bradford – will be taught by
visiting nurses from Kane Community Hospital that are experienced
in home care. Both classes are slated to run from 7 to 8 p.m.

Registration is now being accepted; the program is being offered
to the public through the support of the Blaisdell Foundation.

Officials said the primary approach to the class is to inform
participants on how to care for an ill family member, to reduce the
spread of viruses and how to tell when a trip to the hospital or
doctor’s office is needed.

“We’ve had a good response so far,” Liza Greville, assistant to
the president for Outreach Services, said on Monday. “This is a
unique proactive tool that we’re fortunate to be able to
offer.”

McKean County President Judge John Cleland said while doing
research, he couldn’t find any place across the country that was
training people on how to care for a sick family member at
home.

The class is pertinent now, not only to prepare for the annual
cold and flu season, but to have a model to refer to if the avian
flu or a flu pandemic were to reach this area.

“We don’t want to panic people about the avian flu, but we
wanted to have some sort of preparation,” Cleland said. Cleland has
been doing some work on the national and state levels concerning
the avian flu. “It’s a precautionary thing, but we have to be
prepared in some way.”

Greville said, if need be, the curriculum “can be pulled off the
shelf” and used to educate a large number of people in the case of
a pandemic.

Cleland said a lot of the models used in planning for the avian
flu are based on the numbers from the 1918 flu pandemic.

“If you use those numbers and factor them into McKean County,
the number of people that are sick enough to require
hospitalization will exceed the number of hospital beds by a 10 to
1 margin,” Cleland said. “The lesson you draw from that is people
will have to take care of sick family at home. In 1918, that was a
common thing to do because they didn’t have hospitals or a health
care system like we do today.”

According to figures supplied through the state, in a normal flu
season, the virus kills about 30,000 people a year across the
country.

Cleland said officials would like to have enough people attend
to see if the class is a helpful program, noting if there is a
large amount of participants, the class can be offered “as many
times and in as many locations as we have to do it.”

To register, contact Outreach Services at Pitt-Bradford.