The effect of a community-based disaster drill of simulating Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) on the knowledge and attitude

Abstract

BACKGROUND:We evaluated the effects of community-based disaster drill of simulating disaster medical assistance team on the knowledge and the attitudes. METHODS:Eight hours disaster drills, including didactic lectures, table simulation, and outdoor field simulation, were developed for participants who were recruited from community health centers, emergency departments, fire stations, emergency medical technicians' academy, and emergency information center in the Seoul Metropolitan City area from 2006 to 2008. We surveyed on the knowledge and the attitude using designed questionnaire before and after drill. We compared changes using t-test and repeated measure ANOVA. RESULTS:In this study, 14 community-based drills were performed and 525 (79.4%) people responded to both pre-and post-drill survey. Of these, the doctor was the second common occupation (26.9%) after volunteer students (47.1%). Overall, knowledge and attitude score significantly increased from 3.9±1.0 to 4.3±0.9 (p<0.001) and from 21.4±3.4 to 22.4±3.2 (p<0.001), respectively. The difference among professional license groups between pre-and post-drill knowledge level was significant (p=0.03), while the difference among jobs for attitude between pre-and post-drill was not different (p=0.78). CONCLUSION:Disaster drills on the establishment and operation of DMAT may affect both knowledge and attitude of participants positively.

Evaluation of Disaster Medicine Knowledge Level and Educational Approaches of Future Health Professionals

“…Previous studies show that drills can serve to develop health professionals' competence in practice-based subjects, such as incident command, triage, patient care, evacuation, and decontamination procedures [31][32][33][34][35] . Healthcare students should be given the opportunity to participate in disaster drills, and their participation should be encouraged.…”