I would like to get some feedback on an idea I had for a transit innovation that would help people living in assisted living facilities and nursing home. Although this is not necessarily something that would affect HUD or HUD programs directly, it would benefit HUD if successful in that it would enable operators of long term care facilities to comfortably locate their operations in areas where it might be difficult to do so now.

The idea is a medical bus designed to transport up to twenty people in a wheel chair or in a personal scooter, The bus would have twenty individual pods, ten on each side. The side panel would fold out and drop to the ground to serve as a lift that would then be used to lift the patient back into the bus. The center line of this bus would serve as a walkway to allow a medical assistant to attend to the patients loaded aboard this bus when it is underway.

This bus would have up to twenty individual lifting systems so it would obviously be expensive. It may not even be possible to do because of the weight considerations involved. I am not an engineer so I do not know.

However, such an innovation would greatly facilitate evacuation of the clients of a nursing home in an evacuation scenario. It would take five such vehicles to move patients out of the path of a hurricane for example. I also think it would reduce the cost of routine trips to the doctor's office at large assisted living facilities. Although it is a round-about way of doing so, this innovation has the potential to reduce the cost of long term care by a small amount.