Bangladeshi nursing students' perceived preparedness and readiness for disaster management

This study assesses Bangladeshi nursing students' perceived preparedness and readiness for disaster management activities and examines the influencing factors for the disaster readiness of the students. A self-administered descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted among nursing students of eight nursing education institutes and hospitals in Dhaka city using the modified Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool (DPET) in Bengali (the lingua frank in the country). Three hundred and eighty respondents' data were analyzed using SPSS 25 software. Overall, student nurses' perceived levels of disaster preparedness (mean = 3.12; SD = 0.59), disaster response-ability (mean = 3.65; SD = 0.60), and disaster recovery-ability (mean = 3.45; SD = 0.69) were moderate; however, their perceived readiness for disaster management was low. The levels of disaster preparedness were significantly higher in respondents of public nursing institutes than in the respondents of private nursing institutes (p = 0.006). In addition, significant moderate positive correlations were found among the respondents' disaster preparedness, response-ability, and recovery-ability scores (p ≤ 0.01). Moreover, ordinal logit regression analysis showed that disaster response-ability (OR = 1.97; 95% CI: 1.27–3.05), disaster recovery-ability (OR = 1.59; 95% CI: 1.10–2.29), and gender (OR = 1.90; 95% CI: 1.10–3.28) had a statistically significant influence on the readiness for disaster management of the nursing students. Furthermore, more than half of the respondents recommended more workshops and training on disaster management to increase their disaster management capacity. In addition, one-fourth of them suggested more drills and practical knowledge for enhancing their disaster management capacity. As tomorrow's frontline health workers, student nurses should be well prepared and ready to effectively manage future disasters and emergencies in Bangladesh.