Preparing Health Care Professionals for Public Health Disaster Management

Abstract

Introduction:Disasters are a major challenge for public health because of damage caused by death, injury, or illness that exceeds health services’ ability to respond. Health professionals and students require awareness and understanding of particular aspects of disaster planning, mitigation, response, or recovery. In Brazil, despite the increase in the number and intensity of disasters, there is no formal acceptance regarding the need to integrate disaster content into curriculum guidelines (1)Aim:To develop and test referential and models for disaster management health professional education.Methods:Competence-based education has been proposed. The methodology adopted was developed by the Association (2) and adapted to be used in the Brazilian context. An initial literature search was performed in MEDLINE via PubMed, Google Scholar, Lilacs, and Scielo databases using disaster and competencies as descriptors.Results:Articles and documents in Portuguese, Spanish, and English were identified for: public health (21), nursing (20), multi-professional (16), psychology (4), pharmacy (4), dentistry (2), medicine (1), veterinary (2), and nutrition (1). Data were organized according to a proposal from the literature (3) Selection of benchmarks for the preparation of education models identified 27 referential, three of them developed in Brazil.Discussion:Application and evaluation of the methodology developed with undergraduate students of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul consisted of an initiative to prepare health care professionals for disaster management.