Hospitals should anticipate workforce reductions in disasters

Citation

(2009), "Hospitals should anticipate workforce reductions in disasters", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 18 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2009.07318eab.001

Hospitals should anticipate workforce reductions in disasters

Article Type: News items From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 18, Issue 5

Hospital emergency workers say they will not respond equally to all emergencies, according to research published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine. While about 87 percent of emergency room workers said they would come to work in the event of an airplane crash, only 54 percent said they would in a disaster involving biological agent. In the event of a radioactive bomb, 72 percent would come in.

Lori Masterson of Chicago’s Resurrection Medical Center and colleagues surveyed 204 emergency room workers from eight Chicago hospitals who participated in the May 2003 TOPOFF 2 national disaster drill.

Masterson and colleagues wrote in JEM, “Hospital management should anticipate significant reductions in workforce during biologic and radioactive disaster events. Employees’ willingness to respond was not augmented by any incentives offered by hospitals, although enhanced financial remuneration and disability coverage showed the most potential to increase response.”

In Britain, a similar survey revealed that as many as 85 percent of National Health Service workers might stay off the job if an influenza pandemic occurred in the country.

This survey, published in the open access journal BMC Public Health, found that absenteeism in a pandemic would be considerably higher than current estimates. The researchers found, “The likelihood of working may differ by job type. While doctors were more likely to say they would attend, nurses and ancillary staff were more likely to say they would stay away. The survey shows that willingness to work during a pandemic will be strongly impacted by two types of factors.”

“First, issues relating to family and caring responsibilities. Workers with children or elderly family for whom they are carers would be more likely to be absent from work if influenza illness at home (or the possibility of it) became a worry.”

“Second, issues relating to the work environment itself. These included the possibility of having to take on duties for which a worker felt they had not received training, being asked to work at a different place (from) normal, working with untrained people, or fears of possible future litigation if mistakes were made while working under abnormal conditions.”

Both reports found that hospital personnel are pretty much immune to incentives to report to work when faced with a disaster that might affect their own long-term health.

The British group wrote, “Measures intended to persuade health care workers to work as normal during a pandemic will need to be tailored to different job types. But as the research suggests, the groups who may be most in need of suitable interventions may also be the least receptive.”

Patients in a pandemic appear to be more pliable than employees, however. Swiss investigators found that air travelers in Europe were remarkably willing to comply with traditional public health measures in the event of an outbreak of contagious disease. They collected data from 1,880 travelers at airports in Haut-Rhin, France, and Kloten, Switerland. Author Nicole Senpinar-Brunner and colleagues, writing in the May 2009 Emerging Infectious Diseases (www.cdc.gov/EID/content/15/5/831.htm), found, “A total of 71.6 percent would cancel their trip if postponement of nonessential travel was recommended, 93.7 percent would wear face masks, 93.2 percent would fill out a health questionnaire, and 89.1 percent would accept having their ear temperature measured on arrival. If fever were detected, 88.1 percent would undergo a short physical examination. If persons were diagnosed with a disease and were receiving treatment, 92.3 percent would accept isolation for seven days. If feeling healthy but were seated next to someone with a cough on the airplane, 69.2 percent would accept seven-day quarantine … and would monitor their health.”

(Abstracted from Natural Hazards Observer, July 2009)