Abstract
Purpose: This study aims to identify the factors that inhibit the promotion of hospital disaster response plans depending on whether nursing managers have disaster experience. Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted for nursing managers working at 1,342 hospitals with more than 200 beds nationwide in Japan. Participants were asked to choose "Yes" or "No" to five question items including "Notifying all employees of the necessity for obtaining the understanding of families in assembling employees in an emergency" and "Conducting desk simulations to evaluate recovery from disasters and provide long-term response", and to write comments to an open-ended question about factors inhibiting hospital disaster response plans. Results: Questionnaires were sent to nursing managers of 1,342 facilities and 273 responses were collected (20.3%). From a co-occurrence network diagram related to inhibiting factors, the following relationships were found: for the factors that inhibit "Notifying all employees of the necessity for obtaining the understanding of families in assembling employees in an emergency", "family" and "disaster" were strongly related to "disaster experience" and "no disaster experience", respectively. For "Notifying all employees about what to do when assembled", "training" and "manual" were strongly related to "no disaster experience". For "Conducting desk simulations to evaluate recovery from disasters and provide long-term response", "disaster" was strongly related to "no disaster experience". Conclusions: The factors inhibiting hospital disaster response plans differ depending on the experience of disasters, suggesting the need to give consideration to factors inhibiting the plans.
