Preparing Healthcare Professionals for Disaster Response

Frequent natural disasters, emergencies, and health crises have underscored the urgent need for well-prepared health professionals. Nurses, pivotal in disaster scenarios, perform diverse roles, yet there are gaps in disaster management education within nursing courses.

Despite efforts to integrate disaster nursing competencies into curricula, the focus remains theoretical rather than practical.

Simulations and drills serve as essential learning tools for nursing and other health students, offering a safe space to practice skills and understand disaster scenarios. However, collaboration among different health professions in these exercises is often lacking, hindering the comprehensive preparation of nursing students for real disaster scenarios.

A new scoping review published in the December 2023 issue of JBI Evidence Synthesis, Interprofessional disaster exercises for undergraduate nursing students mapped disaster exercises involving interprofessional students, healthcare, and non-healthcare practitioners. It revealed limited emphasis on multidisciplinary involvement within nursing curricula.

While most participants reported positive learning experiences, challenges in role clarification, preparation, and lack of consistent exercise methodologies were evident. Logistics posed significant challenges, demanding thorough planning, adequate resources, and structured debriefing post-exercise.

The studies highlighted the necessity for meticulous planning, defining roles, allocating resources, fostering collaborative efforts, and limiting participants for effective disaster exercises. Clear goals, stakeholder identification, debriefing, and comprehensive evaluation were deemed essential. The absence of studies from disaster-prone regions like Asia was notable.

The review underscores the need for standardised models and comprehensive preparation to ensure optimal learning experiences and effective disaster response readiness among future healthcare professionals.

Editorial accompanies the scoping review, summarising some of the findings and noting:

“Ultimately, disaster simulation inclusion in nursing, or indeed any health professional curricula, is not only “nice to have” but a necessity to prepare students for these scenarios in their professional roles.”

The scoping review is available in the final issue of JBI Evidence Synthesis for 2023:

Interprofessional disaster exercises for undergraduate nursing students: a scoping review

Dinh, Thi Thuy Ha; Tori, Kathleen; Hines, Sonia
JBI Evidence Synthesis. 21(12):2281-2308, December 2023.