Nurses' Awareness and Perceptions towards Disaster Situations

Man-made or natural disasters are occurring more frequently in India and around the world. It is important that all nurses be prepared to care for people affected by disasters. An exploratory survey was conducted to assess the nurses' awareness regarding disaster nursing and their perceived abilities to react when disaster strikes. In this study, conducted in Aurangabad (MS), a total of 60 nurses of various cadres were selected by simple random sampling method. Semi-structured questionnaire was prepared with 15 questions to assess the awareness regarding disaster nursing and 15 questions related to perceived abilities of the nurses. Overall awareness level of Nurses was good, still majority of the nurses had gaps in the awareness. The overall ability of the all cadres of nurses was not satisfactory. Awareness about disaster nursing is independent of cadre of nurses. To test this we applied standard F test for collective comparison of means using ANOVA table. Since the computed F ratio was less than the table value the mean awareness of four cadres did not differ significantly accepting null hypothesis. Looking at the means for four cadres it was found that mean ability of teachers, staff nurses, D7 year students and IV year students did not differ significantly; however their ability score was substantially low as compared to the awareness score.