Awareness of Nursing Staff Regarding Disaster preparedness in the Emergency Department

Background: Disasters have a significant impact on society and many of history's great civilizations have been brought to their knees by the effect of natural disasters. Nurses play a key role in disasters, should be sufficiently prepared and have good knowledge in responding to disasters to reduce the negative consequences on the population affected by disasters. Aim: Assess awareness of nursing staff regarding disaster preparedness in the emergency department. Design: A descriptive research design was used. Setting: This study was carried out at Emergency Department at Dar Al Fouad Hospital – Nasr City branch, Egypt. Sample: All nursing staff who were available during the study period and accepted to participate in this study setting were included. Tool: One tool was used to collect study data: Demographic data, Nurses Knowledge, reported Practice, and Attitude self-administrated interview questionnaire. Results: Results of the present study showed that 73.1% of the studied nurses had unsatisfactory level of knowledge, 67.3% of the studied nurses had inadequate level of practice, and 63.5% of the studied nurses had negative attitude level regarding to disaster preparedness. Conclusion: There was a positive strong highly statistically significant correlation between total knowledge, reported practice, and attitude regarding disaster preparedness among the studied nurses, there was a highly statistically significant relation between total knowledge and nurses demographic characteristics, also there was no statistically significant relation between total reported practice, attitude regarding to disaster preparedness and nurses demographic data. Recommendations: Providing in-service educational training programs and upgrading courses based on evidence-based guidelines