Investigating the Factors Affecting Nurses’ Preparedness in Response to Natural Disasters

To perform appropriate and effective interventions to improve nurses ‘preparedness, it is necessary to identify the factors affecting nurses’ preparedness in disasters. The purpose of this study was to review the effects of the factors affecting nurses’ preparedness in response to natural disasters.

This systematic review by searching Persian articles with the keywords of Preparedness, clinical skills, competence, disasters, nurses and contributing factors in valid databases such as SID, Iran Medex, Magiran, Web of Sciences, PubMed, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Science Direct and Scopus from 2011 to 2020. A total of 1203 articles were found. 18 articles were extracted from them. Inclusion criteria included originality, writing in Persian and English, and compliance with the purpose of the study, and exclusion criteria included not having access to the full text of the article.

Previous experience of disasters (30%), age, work experience, male gender and higher education level (about 28%) and knowledge of disasters (about 16.66%) are the most important predictors the level of preparedness of nurses in response to natural disasters, respectively.

Discussion and Conclusion:

Based on the results, it can be said that in order to achieve the level of preparedness of nurses in response to natural disasters, all aspects should be considered, including previous experiences, nurses’ demographics, training received and the nature of disasters, and relevant interventions designed and implemented based on them.