Natural Disaster Preparedness Scale for Nursing Department of Hospital

My name is Ayumi Nishigami and I am teaching disaster nursing in the university in Japan.
This site presents "Natural Disaster Preparedness Scale for Nursing Department of Hospital" developed by me. It was developed in order to allow nursing departments in hospitals to check and improve their preparedness for disaster by themselves.
To determine a constructive concept as the foundation of this scale, the Preparedness Cycle by Department of USA Homeland Security (DHS) (Homeland Security, 2008) was used.
This Preparedness Cycle consists of six activities: Plan, Organize, Train, Equip, Exercise, Evaluate and improve.
The items to be included in each activity were developed based on the data obtained from the interview with the persons in charge of nursing at disaster in the Japanese disaster base hospitals in 2007, the existing check lists, the questions that have been used in previous surveys regarding disaster prevention in hospitals, and the literature. The scale was verified after having been developed by some processes: examination of the content validity and the face validity of the scale items by the experts; pretest; main survey to examine the reliability and the validity.
The number of the items was 114 in total:(1) Plan (49 items);(2) Organize (11 items);(3) Equip (14 items):(4)Train (22 items);(5) Exercise (9 items);(6) Evaluate and improve (9 items).A four-point scale was used for each question with more points indicating more preparedness:1 (never done);2 (hardly done);3 (mostly done);4 (done).

Natural Disaster Preparedness Scale for Nursing Department of Hospital（PDF）

This site was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C) number 25463381 from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

Ayumi Nishigami, RN, Ph.D

Aino University
4-5-4 Higashioda Ibaraki,Osaka
567-0012 JAPAN
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