Disaster Nursing App for iPhone Android as Tool for Real Time Learning Transfer

At a time when major disasters are occurring globally with increasing frequency and intensity, it is essential that our nation’s nurses and nursing students possess the knowledge, skills and abilities to respond to a disaster in a timely and appropriate manner.  Despite significant funding for hospital and public health preparedness since 9/11, efforts by health care institutions, universities and schools of nursing to educate and train nurses about disaster preparedness and response have been sporadic and difficult to sustain.  Many nurses, nursing students and nursing faculty remain inadequately prepared. The fact that disasters are low frequency, high impact events makes them extremely difficult to prepare for. Restructuring of current academic nursing educational programs and a national movement towards shorter, accelerated nursing programs has created additional obstacles to preparing pre-licensure nursing students for disaster response. Hospital and community based staff development nurse educators are also challenged to prepare and sustain their nursing workforce for disaster readiness.

The innovative use of digital technologies must be explored in order to achieve nurse preparedness for disaster and large scale public health emergencies.  This project explores the innovative use of a novel digital technology called Disaster Nursing Application (“App): for I-phone or Android device as a useful adjunct to enhancing learning transfer.

This presentation will introduce and demonstrate the application of this innovative technology- the Disaster Nursing App as an educational tool for preparing nurses in both the academic and workplace setting. The use of the Disaster Nursing App in concert with carefully designed disaster case scenarios based upon real life events assists students in acquiring the knowledge and skills they need to respond to a broad spectrum of disasters and large scale public health emergencies in a timely and appropriate manner. The selection of content and design of this digital application is based upon the state of the science in disaster response. The content was mapped to the existing CDC competencies for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and the International Council of Nursing Disaster nursing competencies (2009). Clear and focused guidelines are provided for the integration of this disaster nursing application into existing course curricula and hospital based disaster drills.  A framework for metrics for the evaluation of student performance is proposed.