Nursing Interventions During a Disaster

Nursing Interventions During a Disaster
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The Phases of a Disaster
Disasters, whether natural or man-made, pose a great risk in the environment and the people. These can be categorized into four phases namely, planning, rescue, response or recovery, and mitigation. Planning pertains to the efforts for increasing awareness of the types of catastrophes that may ensue and how to overcome them. After planning, the respondents will organize a rescue mission to guarantee the victims’ safety. Subsequently, the survivors will be taken into custody to restore their everyday functioning by performing several assessments and treating them holistically by bringing into attention their physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being. Next, the government will organize conferences and meetings to evaluate the disaster preparedness and management of each unit to reduce the impact of future disasters (American Academy of Pediatrics, n.d.).
Preventive Strategies
Since disasters bring inevitable catastrophic events to the society that may cause epidemics, primary health care providers, including nurses, are trained to deliver prevention strategies. There are three types of prevention, namely, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary prevention is concerned with mediating before health hazards occur. Examples of this include vaccinations, modification of modifiable risk factors, and prohibition of substances that may cause diseases. Secondary prevention involves an early assessment to recognize the disease in its initial stage before the commencement of the signs and symptoms. Tertiary prevention involves the treatment of the disease after diagnosis is made (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.).
For primary prevention measures, nurses, together with doctors and health institutions, can arrange mass vaccinations to counter preventable diseases during disasters such as hepatitis, cholera, dengue, typhoid fever, flu, MMR, tetanus, etc (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). They can also organize a community-based teaching plan regarding the prevention measures regarding certain diseases. Nurses can also impart their knowledge regarding modifiable risk factors like in hypertension since its long term sequelae can be cardiac arrest which may happen in emergencies such as earthquakes, flash floods, etc (Nozaki et al, 2013). This was evident in the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan in 2011 where the blood pressure of some victims continued to be high for 4-6 weeks after the disaster before restoring to its baseline levels (Tanaka et al, 2013).
Post-traumatic stress disorder is typical during catastrophic events. This can hinder a person’s personal growth and personality development. Nurses can give a secondary preventive me...