NURS FPX 6618 Assessment 3 – Disaster Plan With Guidelines for Implementation: Tool Kit for the Team
An effective way of handling future disasters is through planning and resource mobilization plans. This planning will assist in effectively mobilizing resources to address the needs of an affected population with ease and fairness. It is imperative to ensure an uninterrupted, coordinated process of recovery when offering services to communities in need (El Sayed et al., 2017). Palliative care during a disaster is unique, being that patients will need their medications and treatments to remain comfortable, but do not require life-sustaining measures in most situations.
Care Coordination and Community Needs Assessment
Communities face multiple challenges when a disaster occurs that need effective and appropriate planning. Key challenges include but are not limited to a lack of protective gear and insufficient healthcare facilities capable of handling disasters such as the global pandemic experienced three years ago. Additionally, the lack of adequate healthcare staff and the increase in emotional unpreparedness resulted in catastrophic loss and long-term medical problems (Nolte, 2018). Using the recent coronavirus pandemic as an example, we saw that many countries were not prepared for a disaster, but lessons can be learned to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
The pandemic revealed the true unprepared state of most healthcare organizations all over the world. In the United States, many communities suffered and lost residents and livelihoods due to this lack of preparedness. First-world countries were unable to supply needed protective gear for healthcare workers in the hospital and communities. Emergency and disaster preparedness plans up until the pandemic were organization-led strategies, while now they need to be community-based as well (Nolte, 2018). Hospitals were full of patients in need of critical care, with resources being allocated to a survival-based method. The impact of the pandemic surprised hospitals when they were hit almost overnight in March 2020. Disasters negatively impact a hospital system’s functioning and disrupt regular operations (Towbin et al., 2021).
Palliative care is provided in many different environments and locations to those presenting with life-limiting illnesses or injuries, with the greatest emphasis on those at the end of life. The pandemic did not change the fact that patients were at the end of their lives and still needed symptom control and supportive care, but it did affect how they received the care (Nouvet et al., 2018). In the wake of the COVID pandemic, palliative care services increased substantially with the number of patients suffering end-of-life effects from the virus.
NURS FPX 6618 Assessment 3 – Disaster Plan With Guidelines for Implementation: Tool Kit for the Team
Key Elements of a Disaster Preparedness Project Plan
Care coordination is a key element in the management of patient care during a disaster to ensure resources are delegated to the sickest and most critical of patients. Additional training will be needed to educate coordinators on how to communicate with organizations outside of their health system to provide adequate care. Management of a disaster can be represented as a repeated process that is comprised of three phases, including preparedness, response, and recovery (Rajapaksha et al., 2023). Each phase is as important as the last to ensure a smooth and effective progression. A key element is to assess capacity limits, which is even more important than encouraging stakeholders to participate. If there is nowhere to treat the ill, then no treatment can be provided (Rajapaksha et al., 2023).
Emergency Personnel, Interagency Relationships, and Resources
Care coordination during a disaster is key to ensuring patient care is uninterrupted even if the personnel, resources, and care environment are disrupted. The coordinators will be responsible for delegating resources to those in need while coordinating care for those less critical (Deschepper et al., 2021). Specifically, the stakeholders involved will include nurses, social workers, physicians, and emergency medical personnel. Resource allocation can be within a health system or between health systems in a local area. Throughout the disaster, insignificant differences need to be put aside, and the focus put on patients and the best care afforded to them where it may end up being. During a disaster, an inventory of equipment, medications, and supplies should be constantly maintained, with stockpiles readily available as needed (El Sayed et al., 2017). This element is not directly part of care coordination, but it is key to ensuring care is provided safely and successfully.
Management of palliative care during a disaster should not affect care methods; however, it will need to adapt to increased patient enrollment and needs. Factors that can impact care include a patient’s proximity to health services after a disaster occurs and can also affect what palliative care can be allocated (Nouvet et al., 2018). Other factors include the transportation of these patients during a disaster, the age of patients in need of palliative medical care, and the inevitable possibility of needing to orphan those that they are unable to reach during a disaster (Nouvet et al., 2018).
In the end, no matter the level of medical care needed, a proper disaster plan needs to be developed and taught to all staff to avoid a repeat of the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States lost over 400,000 people to the pandemic, and millions lost their jobs as industries and schools locked down. The pandemic taught the world that there needs to be viable coordination and collaboration of care between all the different players in the game to ensure healthcare delivery is not interrupted in the future.
References
Deschepper, M., Eeckloo, K., Malfait, S., Benoit, D., Callens, S., & Vansteelandt, S. (2021). Prediction of hospital bed capacity during the COVID− 19 pandemic. BMC Health Services Research, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06492-3
El Sayed, M., Chami, A. F., & Hitti, E. (2017). Developing a hospital disaster preparedness plan for Mass Casualty incidents: Lessons learned from the downtown Beirut bombing. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 12(3), 379–385. https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2017.83
Nolte, I. M. (2018). Interorganizational collaborations for humanitarian aid: An analysis of partnership, community, and single organization outcomes. Public Performance & Management Review, 41(3), 596–619. https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2018.1462212
Nouvet, E., Sivaram, M., Bezanson, K., Krishnaraj, G., Hunt, M., de Laat, S., Sanger, S., Banfield, L., Rodriguez, P. F., & Schwartz, L. J. (2018). Palliative care in humanitarian crises: A review of the literature. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-018-0033-8
Towbin, A. J., Regan, J., Hulefeld, D., Schwieterman, E., Perry, L. A., O’Brien, S., Dhamija, A., OConnor, T., & Moskovitz, J. A. (2021). Disaster planning during SARS-COV-2/COVID: One radiology informatics team’s story. Journal of Digital Imaging, 34(2), 290–296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-021-00420-x
Rajapaksha, N. U., Abeysena, C., Balasuriya, A., Wijesinghe, M. S., Manilgama, S., & Alemu, Y. (2023). The incidence management system of the healthcare institutions for Disaster Management in Sri Lanka. BMC Emergency Medicine, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12873-023-00777-y
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Question 
Develop a disaster preparedness tool kit for a community or population. Then, develop a 5-slide presentation for
your care coordination team to prepare them to use the tool kit to execute a disaster preparedness plan.