Disaster Readiness for Nurses in the Workplace - Essay Example

"Disaster Readiness for Nurses in the Workplace" is a well-written example of a paper on care.
Workers in any field are prone to facing some disasters as they carry out their daily duties. The journal article disaster readiness for nurses in the workplace depicts how nurses need to prepare for the disasters that they encounter in the line of their work (Lowe &Hummel, 2015). The disasters that arise in nurses’ line of duties might be far-reaching in a way that they might be a threat to the lives of others. Nurses, therefore, need to find the arising challenges in the management of these disasters and come up with the appropriate emergency responses. The nurses’ preparedness has a significant role in the management of these disasters. Nurses are expected to prioritize the needs of people in case of a situation that is unexpected. There are four stages of disaster management and these are prevention or mitigation, being prepared, showing a response, and recovery. Nurses possess unique skills for addressing the various issues disasters that arise and these skills include assessment, the setting of priorities, collaboration, and addressing preventive as well as the needs for acute care. They also have a skill that involves educating the involved parties in the occurrence of a disaster, offering first aid services including one that is psychological and other public health services that are essential (Baack& Alfred, 2013).

The mitigation stage involves preventing issues and disasters before they actually happen. Prevention measures may include improvement of surveillance and other security operations, carrying out testing, immunization, and isolation where need arise. The preparedness stage for nurses involves ensuring that they maintain personal as well as professional preparedness. This requires the nurses to be able to respond quickly when a disaster arises and this will include activities such as maintaining a first aid kit or other items necessary for responding to an emergency. The response stage involves taking the right measures in the occurrence of the actual disaster. The first level of this stage requires the nurses to mobilize the appropriate departments such as the fire and the emergency services departments. If need be, the next level will be involving the national response framework. Recovery as the final stage involves the activities that nurses undertake to return the conditions to normal. In cases where it is possible to get back to normal, nurses will require to return the social welfare to a state that is close to how it would have been if the disaster did not occur in the first place (Lowe & Hummel, 2014).

This process of disaster management by the nurses however will have its impacts on the organization in terms of finances, personnel, patient care, and the reputation of the hospital. The financial impact will be that the hospital will require committing some amount of funds to the disaster management process conducted by the nurses. The impact in terms of personnel will be that the hospital will be required to offer the appropriate person who will be involved in seeing the effectiveness of the disaster management process. The impact in terms of patient care is that more attention will be given to the patients who are affected by the disaster and the impact in terms of hospital reputation will entail how the public will end up perceiving the hospital. The public perception will be dependent on how well the nurses are able to address the disaster. It well managed, there will result in a positive reputation and if poorly managed there will result in a bad reputation and other cases such as legal litigations (Baack & Alfred, 2013).