2022 Volume 8 Issue 1 Pages 23-31
Hospitals play an important role in maintaining social infrastructure and are therefore required to perform emergency response work in addition to their daily routine work in the event of a natural disaster or pandemic. Thus, hospitals regularly conduct disaster exercises and education to raise the crisis awareness of medical staff, preparing for a quick response during a disaster.
However, many hospitals implement disaster exercises only a few times per year. Moreover, even if the exercises are performed, it is often difficult to impart the same feeling of tension as can be felt during a disaster. Therefore, it is difficult to encourage medical staff to develop their crisis awareness and actions, which may inhibit preparation for disasters.
This study proposed a mechanism that results in a change in crisis awareness and action with reference to past research and subsequently developed a questionnaire based on this mechanism. The questionnaire was administered to the staff of a certain base disaster hospital to clarify the reasons for crisis awareness and action changes in response to disasters. The results of this study will make it possible to design both disaster exercises and education that promote crisis awareness and action changes among medical staff.
In this study, crisis awareness is defined as the awareness that triggers action in response to an event after it is recognized through proactive information gathering and disaster response, and a change in action is defined as an individual healthcare staff member’s effort to solve the problems faced by the hospital.
