Herberman Mash Holly B, Fullerton Carol S, Kowalski-Trakofler Kathleen, Reissman Dori B, Scharf Ted, Shultz James M, Ursano Robert J
Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Department of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, USA.
NCC Counseling, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Disaster Med Public Health Prep. 2013 Apr;7(2):153-9. doi: 10.1017/dmp.2013.13.
Examinations of the demands on public health workers after disaster exposure have been limited. Workers provide emergency care while simultaneously risking injury, damage to personal property, and threats to their own and their family's safety. We examined the disaster management experiences of 4323 Florida Department of Health workers 9 months after their response to 4 hurricanes and 1 tropical storm during a 7-week period in August and September of 2004.
Participants completed a self-report questionnaire focused on work performance, mental and physical health, daily functioning, sleep disturbance, physiological arousal, and injury and work demand at the time of the hurricanes, and answered open-ended questions that described their experiences in more detail.
A qualitative analysis conducted from the write-in data yielded 4 domains: (1) work/life balance; (2) training for disaster response role; (3) workplace support; and (4) recovery.
Study findings highlighted a number of concerns that are important to public health workers who provide emergency care after a disaster and, in particular, multiple disasters such as during the 2004 hurricane season. The findings also yielded important recommendations for emergency public health preparedness.
对灾难暴露后公共卫生工作者所面临需求的研究一直有限。工作者们在提供紧急护理的同时，自身面临受伤风险、个人财产受损，以及自身和家人安全受到威胁。我们调查了佛罗里达州卫生部4323名工作者在2004年8月和9月为期7周的时间里应对4场飓风和1场热带风暴9个月后的灾难管理经历。
参与者完成了一份自我报告问卷，内容集中在工作表现、身心健康、日常功能、睡眠障碍、生理唤醒，以及飓风发生时的受伤情况和工作需求，并回答了开放式问题，更详细地描述了他们的经历。
对书面数据进行的定性分析得出了4个领域：（1）工作/生活平衡；（2）灾难应对角色培训；（3）工作场所支持；（4）恢复。
研究结果突出了一些对灾难后提供紧急护理的公共卫生工作者很重要的问题，特别是在2004年飓风季这样的多次灾难期间。这些结果还为应急公共卫生准备工作提出了重要建议。
