Are We Ready? Exploring Ambulatory Care Nurses Disaster Knowledge and Willingness to Help

The world has experienced an increase in disasters, both natural and caused by humans. Earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, and terrorist attacks have all occurred over the last decade. Responding to these events requires tremendous resources, including trained healthcare providers. One solution to adding resources is enlisting nurses, who make up the largest discipline in health care. This project focused on improving ambulatory care nurse emergency preparedness knowledge, willingness to deploy to disasters, and willingness to teach patients about disaster preparedness. A quasi-experimental design was used in this pre- and post-educational intervention project. The theoretical frameworks used were the San Diego 8A’s change model and Orem’s theory of self-care. Two validated assessment tools, the emergency preparedness information questionnaire (EPIQ) and the readiness estimate & deployability index (READI), were used to measure changes in nurse knowledge. Project data was reviewed using a paired two-sample t-test and Cohen’s d effect size measure. A convenience sample of n = 41 nurses completed the pre-and-post EPIQ and READI surveys and the educational intervention. The paired t-test showed 37 of 44 EPIQ questions had p values of p < .05. The remaining six questions had p values exceeding p > .05. All 33 READI question sets had p values of p < .05, indicating a statistically significant difference between pre-and post-education responses. All but one EPIQ question had Cohen’s effect scores of d =.05 or higher, indicating a medium to strong post-education intervention effect. READI Cohen’sd analysis showed that 12 of 33 questions had scores of d = .02 or less, indicating a slight effect from the educational intervention. The remaining questions showed a medium to strong effect with Cohen’s dscores of d = .05 or higher. The paired t test result for question 32 was a p < .001. The Cohen’s d effect measure analysis for question 32 was d =1.176, indicating an improvement in nurses’ willingness to educate patients on disaster preparedness. The results of this project confirmed that the introduction of evidence-based disaster education improved ambulatory care nurse knowledge, willingness to deploy to a disaster, and willingness to educate others.