Disaster Nursing

As a nurse, you are responsible for the care of your patients and their safety in the event of a disaster. All emergency plans are centered around the best way to keep patients and staff out of harm’s way as much as possible. On top of caring for their patient’s, nurses are also responsible for triaging of patients, if necessary, to ensure care is efficient and the most people can be helped. Nurses will also coordinate places for patients to stay if they aren’t assigned to a room, and they will help implement the emergency plan while remaining calm and professional. As you can imagine, the task of a nurse is great in a disaster situation, but nurses were made to care for others. Nurses are resilient and very determined to provide the best care to their patients in disaster situations. If you investigate previous disasters such as hurricane Katrina at Memorial Hospital like we discussed in class, you will see that history proves just how much nurses give back to their patients.

      The ANA code of ethics does bring up a dilemma when comparing provisions 2 and 5. It is easy to think that the patient is your first priority as a nurse, because patients are sick and need care from nurses. In a disaster situation, nurses may also be hurt or in need of care however, and they also need to make sure they take care of themselves. I am a firm believer that if you don’t take care of yourself, then you won’t be able to care for others. In a disaster situation, it is vital that nurses stay healthy so they can care for their patients. On the other hand, if it came down to choosing between helping myself or my patient, I think it would be impossible to choose. This choice often comes into play during disaster situations, which I can only imagine would be very challenging for any nurse. Because of this, it’s important to remember in a disaster it is the worst-case situation, and people often are forced into decisions that they would never make in day to day nursing.