Disaster care provider workforce assessment.

Large scale disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and radiologic emergencies pose significant risks to both patients and patient care providers. In an era of declining federal funding for emergency preparedness training (EPT), the importance of state and local initiatives to provide EPT has increased. Unfortunately, few US regions have performed workforce assessments of their patient care providers to measure levels of preparedness, record training preferences and assess EPT needs.

High-fidelity multiactor emergency preparedness training for patient care providers.

Background: Providing comprehensive emergency preparedness training (EPT) for patient care providers is important to the future success of emergency preparedness operations in the United States. Disasters are rare, complex events involving many patients and environmental factors that are difficult to reproduce in a training environment. Few EPT programs possess both competency-driven goals and metrics to measure life-saving performance during a multiactor simulated disaster.