Nurses’ perceived emergency preparedness knowledge: An opportunity for improvement

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to provide foundational data supporting the need for nursing education focused on emergency preparedness and response for nursing staff.Design: This study is a cross-sectional, quantitative, descriptive, correlational quality improvement study.Setting: The study location is a Midwest healthcare system comprised of 14 acute care facilities including pediatric and adult level I trauma centers, a burn center, and a fully dedicated pediatric hospital; five long-term care facilities; 230 ambulatory sites; 4,200 employed providers; and a health plan. Participants: A convenience sample of 5,172 currently employed nurses.Main Outcome Measure: The main outcome of this study is the documentation of overall familiarity with emergency preparedness and response knowledge among nursing staff. Logistic ordinal regression statistical analysis was completed to determine the significance of individual domains impacting the overall familiarity score.Results: Findings based on the results of the “overall familiarity with response activities related to a large-scale emergency incident” question documented most staff (78.45 percent) have little or no familiarity with their role in disaster response. Six domains or focused education areas were identified as having a statistically significant impact (p 0.0001 –p = 0.0195) on the results of the overall familiarity question.Conclusions: These study results support the need for more education (academic and/or institutional) related to nursing emergency preparedness and response.