Education for Developing and Sustaining a Health Care Workforce for Disaster Readiness

Abstract

The United States needs a national health care and public health workforce with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to respond to any disaster or public health emergency in a timely and appropriate manner. This requires that all of our nation's nurses and health care providers have unrestrained access to high-quality, evidence-based, competency-driven education and training programs. Programs of study for disaster readiness in both the academic and service sectors are limited in number. Those that do exist may be based upon consensus rather than competency and be price prohibitive. They may fail to fully capitalize on existing educational technologies and may not be accessible to all providers. Nurse leaders are ideally positioned to recognize, advocate, and support the need for a broad array of learning options to strengthen the readiness of the health care workforce for disaster response. This article reviews current challenges and opportunities for the expansion of evidence-based education and training opportunities for health care workforce disaster readiness.

Cohort research analysis of disaster experience, preparedness, and competency-based training among nurses

“…For example, a study in New Zealand showed that despite a low self-reported preparedness among acute care providers, the healthcare service was found to have "responded well to extraordinary circumstances" in the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 [21]. On the other hand, numerous studies show that healthcare workers, confident of their own high competences, are more likely to react effectively in real crises than workers who perceive their competences as low [22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

Call to Action: The Case for Advancing Disaster Nursing Education in the United States

“…A national panel of disaster nursing education experts published consensus recommendations that address disaster nursing education in the US (Veenema, Griffin, et al., ; Langan, Lavin, Wolgast, & Veenema, ). In continuation of this work, the national panel of disaster nursing education experts convened a series of semistructured conference calls to refine and endorse the following action items to advance a national framework for delivering disaster nursing educational programming.…”

Social and emotional loneliness among college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: the predictive role of coping behaviours, social support, and personal resilience

“…Available studies have shown that during stressful events, a resilient individual and those who have an adequate support system and coping skills are less likely to be stressed or feel lonely (Ogińska-Bulik & Michalska 2020;Wu et al, 2016). Adequate support that originates from peers and family was also observed to be vital to assist an individual in effectively managing stress-provoking situations such as disaster events, emergency crises, and infectious disease outbreaks (Langan et al, 2017). During the COVID-19 pandemic, where stress and loneliness are high, personal resilience, positive coping behaviours, and adequate social support may assist frontline health care workers to adequately cope with the burden associated with the pandemic (Cooper et al, 2020) and sustain their mental health and psychological wellbeing (Labrague et al, 2018;Labrague & De los Santos, 2020).…”