In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated several Gulf Coast states and caused many deaths. The hurricane- related deaths of 70 nursing home residents--34 believed drowned in St. Rita's Nursing Home in Louisiana and 36 from 12 other nursing homes--highlighted problems associated with poorly developed and executed disaster plans, uninformed evacuation decision-making, and generally inadequ...

PURPOSE To develop a vision for the future of disaster nursing, identify barriers and facilitators to achieving the vision, and develop recommendations for nursing practice, education, policy, and research. DESIGN AND METHODS A series of semistructured conference calls were conducted with 14 national subject matter experts to generate relevant concepts regarding national nursing workforce pre...

Nurses serve as leaders in disaster preparedness and response at multiple levels: within their own homes and neighborhoods, at disaster scenes, and the workplace, which can vary from a health care facility, in the community, or at the state, national, or international level. This chapter provides an overview on theories of leadership with a historical context for nursing leadership; setting the...

The development of a Professional Nursing Section constitutes a major step forward for the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM). The Nursing Section is this first professional subgroup formed by the WADEM.The creation of this Section was based on the suggestion of nurses from Latin America and the Caribbean during the Regional WADEM Congress in San Salvador in May 2004,...

Three nurse educators, who met at the American Nurses Association Nursing Care in Life, Death and Disaster Conference (Atlanta, June 2007), collaborated on a multimedia conferencing project to teach nursing students about disaster response. This case study examines two outcomes of this project. The project provided students in a disaster nursing course in Indiana an opportunity to meet faculty ...

Disaster literacy is the process of understanding, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating a disaster problem in detail, making correct conscious decisions at end process. Nurses assume important roles responsibilities all stages disasters with their technical skills knowledge epidemiology, physiology, pharmacology, cultural-family structures, psychosocial issues. A literate individual needs to...

Nurses play an important role in responding to disasters. Preparing nurses to participate in planning for and responding to a disaster is integral to undergraduate nursing education. The authors describe the evaluation of a collaborative learning model that has been used to teach undergraduate nursing students about disaster preparedness.

PURPOSE This is an exploratory study of nursing home preparedness in South Carolina intended to: (1) examine nursing home administrators' perceptions of disaster preparedness in their facility in the absence of an immediate emergency or disaster, and changes in their views about preparedness following a large disaster; (2) study whether administrators' knowledge of shortcomings in preparedness ...

INTRODUCTION In order to prepare the healthcare system and healthcare personnel to meet the health needs of populations affected by disasters, educational programs have been developed by numerous academic institutions, hospitals, professional organizations, governments, and non-government organizations. Lacking standards for best practices as a foundation, many organizations and institutions ha...