What is it about?
An exploration of the ability of nurses to be adequately ready for and to respond to a disaster caused by a natural hazard.
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Why is it important?
During a disaster involving a healthcare facility, nurses are commonly the largest group of healthcare workers impacted. The range of problems facing nurses working in healthcare facilities in Australia and New Zealand at the time of disasters triggered by earthquakes and bushfires have been underexamined. A qualitative enquiry was used to explore matters facing nurses working in residential healthcare facilities during a natural disaster. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify the key themes from fifteen in‐depth interviews with nurses.
Perspectives
Using interactive systems and socio‐ecological frameworks helps researchers to better understand the contributions that individuals, teams and organizations make to facilitate the development and maintenance of adaptive capacity and resilience in a nursing workforce. An ecological model of adaptive capacity can be operationalized to guide education, training for nurses and the development of organizational systems and strategies. This study identified factors that help and hinder a nursing workforce’s ability to prepared for, adapt to and learn from natural hazard disasters. This understanding of disaster preparedness and how this may be applied to enable the growth of adaptive nurses provides an insight for a global audience which also adds to nurse education, service delivery, organizational and policy development.
Dr Hazel Maxwell
University of Tasmania
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nurses working in healthcare facilities during natural disasters: a qualitative enquiry, International Nursing Review, August 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/inr.12614.
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