A106) Nursing Simulation in Disaster Management

In the United States in 2010, there were 81 federal disasters, for this reason and at the request of our clinical partners, when West Coast University (WCU) started its Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing (BSN) program in 2008, it recognized the need to have a course in disaster management. The Disaster Management course was developed in concert with other parts of the curriculum such as Leadership, Physical Assessment, Critical Care courses to help students focus their assessment and intervention skills to prepare them to be future responders. As a component of the skill development, simulation exercises were developed in the simulation center within the college of nursing. To prepare students to respond to disasters, a variety of scenarios were developed to meet national patient safety goals and various types of disaster and emergency situations. In the scenarios students learn how to work as a team, follow the chain of command, assess and rapidly intervene to such medical crisis such as hemorrhaging, trauma, burns, cardiac arrest and respiratory arrest. They also learn how to delegate to the appropriate personnel as well as leadership skills. Students find this educational and reassuring to be able to practice these very high level sentinel events in a secure environment where they will get immediate feedback not only from instructors but from their peers. Preliminary research have identified students having significant improvement in their clinical skills from the first to the third exercise in regards to assessment, intervention, communication, and delegation. We have received feedback from our clinical partners that our students are better prepared than their current emergency staff in regards to disaster management and to that end we plan to work with our clinical partners to translate our class into an online course so their staff can be trained on disaster management.