1. You are a nurse manager in charge of developing a disaster plan for your unit. As the manager, you will need to include the influential agencies, stakeholders and the roles of the nurses in disasters.
2. Identify the influential agencies and stakeholders you would include in your plan.
3. Describe the roles of the nurses in disaster planning and actual disasters.
4. How would you ensure the nurses on the unit understand their roles in the disaster plan?
Disaster Planning
Natural or man-made, disasters can be scary, chaotic, and tragic events. ANA considers disaster preparedness and response a part of nursing practice. Nurses form the largest group of the healthcare workforce and are often on the frontline in disaster management. Therefore, nurses should be adequately equipped with the knowledge and skills to respond to disasters, starting from their pre-service training to their in-service professional training. During response, the most important phase of disaster management, nurses activate the disaster plan in their hospitals, triage cases, provide emergency treatment for injured people, and help coordinate evacuations and the transportation of patients to other medical facilities.
to understand what motivates each individual and implement policies to obtain maximum performance from a group. The importance of the leaders role in motivating individuals is highlighted in Herzberg’s Two Factor theory. The theory highlights factors that must be in place to avoid dissatisfaction, hygiene factors, and factors that promote satisfaction, motivation factors, shown in Figure 4 (Pettinger, 2007). Herzberg’s theory helps to decipher what motivates individuals, but does not advise on how to implement this to produce maximum productivity from an individual, this is achieved by using the theory in conjunction with other motivational theories such as goal setting theory. Figure 4: Hygiene and Motivating Factors (Pettinger,, 2006) Goal setting is not just an important part of motivation, they are essential for both teamwork and successful leadership, they provide indication on what must be achieved, how much effort they must devoted to achieve it and they act as the primary source of job motivation for individuals, therefore setting them accurately is essential (Pettinger 2007). Specific and clear goals are the most effective motivators, and will lead to optimum performance, therefore it becomes essential for a leader to understand what motivates each individual within a group (Pettinger, 2007). Motivation is highly personal, and can differ massively across a group, so the leader must adapt how they motivate to suit each individual, this highlights the need for an organisation to implement policies that allow leaders to be flexible in how they reward individuals. Issues arise when goals are not set well, if the goals are ambiguous, unachievable or too easy then the individual will lose motivation (Pettinger, 2007). Once goals have been set it becomes essential for leaders to regularly assess how individuals are progressing towards them, if well then goals should be made more challenging, if they are struggling then the goals should be made easier. Goals also allow for leader to assess how the team are performing, and how their leadership style is functioning with the group, if goals are not being met the leader must adapt how the team interact together or their leadership style to achieve them.