Role of Nursing during a disaster

Interesting topic - I'm glad you are exploring it as a student. It will provide you with a different perspective.

All facilities have to have a formal emergency response plan in place - with all types of contingencies. It describes exactly what will be done for any type of disaster - from loss of utilities to fire and explosions.

The disaster plan will also contain a detailed description of what clinical staff are expected to do. Basically, if you're on duty when one is called - you have to stay. If you are not at work, you will usually get a call asking you to come in and how long it will take for you to get there. Note - if it's just a drill, you don't have to come in -- just respond. Our organization has an automated notificaton system - just like the schools have for notifying parents.

Any hoo -- when the disaster is called, staff have to report to their deisgnated areas. For nurses, this is usually either your normal unit (for specialty nurses) or an 'operations center'. Ex: ICU nurses are usually tasked with triaging patients to see who can be transferred out to make room for new admits. Some nurses may be asked to report to a general intake/receiving area to process emergency admits.

Another for instance - our hurricane response protocol (we had 2 with bad damage from IKE)

- 48 hours prior to landfall - focus on patient evacuation from facilities inthe evac zone. Nurses may be asked to accompany patients to other facilities by air or ground ambulance.

- 24 hours prior - set up with emergency equip on standby; prep for loss of utilities (very specific tasks). Sort staff into groups - who will stay during the storm, who will relieve the next day, and so on. Anyone who stays has to be prepared to 'hunker down' and live in the facility for quite a while

Nurses are also trained to manually evauate patients from their units - horizontal first (behind fire doors) and then vertically (down the stairs).

Does that give you a better idea?

I recently completed a web course Nurses on the Front Line: Preparing for and Responding to Emergencies and Disasters. It was very good. It was an overview of scenarios involving chemical, biological and explosive disasters and how to triage. It covered possible health problems and treatments that might happen and what a nurse may be expected to do. I took the free version but there is also a CEU version with a fee. You have to register on the George Washington University website. Here is the link:

http://learning.nnepi.org/

Good luck.

The hospital where I work is a level 2 trauma center. We had an 80 car pileup near the facility about 5 years ago, luckily it was very little major trauma with just alot of bumps, cuts ect. We have mock trauma codes and there is two trauma teams in place in case of an emergerncy.

Check with your local county health dept also. The county I live in has asked nurses to sign up in advance and go thru an orientation class on disasters. Here is another link--if you look around you can find the nurses role in disasters:

http://www.hhs.gov/aspr/opeo/ndms/teams/dmat.html

These responses are great! Thanks so much for the help!