This study examined the effectiveness of using a disaster scenario in a class, designed to help nursing students think about health care outside the hospital. Fifty-seven second-year nursing students (mean age 20 years, all female) were included in the study, which took place in May-June 2019. A pretest verified students’ existing knowledge, and disaster scenarios were developed and taught based on an analysis of social needs and disaster situations. Students wrote worksheets before and after the class, in addition to a report after the class. Chi-square test analysis of the change in the percentage of correct answers between the pretest and posttest showed that 9 of the 11 questions on health care were significant at the 1% level. On the students’ worksheets, 12 words appeared frequently before the class and 24 after. Content analysis of the reports showed that there were 20 subcategories that could be grouped into seven categories. Based on the percentage of correct answers on the posttest, the increase in the number of words on the worksheet, and the content of the categories, the introduction of disaster scenarios into the classroom enabled nursing students to think independently about health care in evacuation center during disasters.

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A training program entitled “understanding disaster risks utilizing maps and identifying emergency evacuation sites when children are in school in the event of heavy rain” was developed and implemented by the authors in June 2022 for DRR teachers in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, in order to support the creation of an effective school evacuation plan. The study examined the decision-making processes of the teachers in charge of DRR to evacuate to the designated evacuation sites outside their own school during heavy rain by understanding inundation and landslides hazard maps based on the relationship between disaster risk and topography. The result showed that the participants did not necessarily choose the emergency evacuation site based on the disaster risk around the school. This paper further discussed the measures to make the training program more effective.

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This study aims to clarify the changes on amount of weight loss and urine component at chair seating under a hot environment. Seven healthy young men volunteered as the subjects for this study. The subjects watched DVD of high school baseball game on in the climate chamber (air temperatures: 33.1 ± 0.1 ℃, humidity: 57.6 ± 0.8 % and WBGT (Wet Bulb Globe Temperature): 29.4 ± 0.2 ℃). The subjects were admitted freely drink the barley tea during the watching game about 2 hours. Water intake, weight loss, sweat loss and urinary electrolyte concentration in the subjects were measured. As a result, no significant differences were observed in the body weight between the before and after watching. Additionally, the subjects drank 518.4 ± 493.1 ml in barley tea and the amount of perspiration was 0.492 ± 0.172 kg. These were almost equivalent values. In contrast, Na/Cr of urinary electrolyte was 8.15 ± 4.65 before the watching and 6.12 ± 2.85 after the watching. This index after the watching were significantly lower than that of before the watching (p < 0.05). Though these results indicates that barley tea intake in a heat environment fluid intake are enough, it’s a possibility the electrolyte is not enough. In heat environment, it will be necessary to take care to drink water and consume salt as during exercise to prevent heat stroke, even if during rest in a chair seating.

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In an era of increasingly unpredictable natural events, disaster response capabilities must be strengthened. This paper discusses how this can be achieved in school settings. Information sharing is vital for rapid appropriate responses in an emergency, and as centralized or hub-style systems can cease functioning when a key person is incapacitated or office inaccessible, a distributed network is more appropriate and robust. The same is true of decision-making systems: centralized decision processes are highly vulnerable, while distributed decision-making processes degrade gracefully. Concrete examples are given of distributed networks for information sharing and decision-making in a school context.

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