Disaster Management

Disaster Management
Author’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Disaster Management
As qualified professionals, nurses can conduct different activities to warn people concerning an impending disaster or reduce the health risks and casualties associated with a disaster. Such activities can fall into three levels: primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention (Shultz, Espinola, Rechkemmer, Cohen, & Espinel, 2016). This essay discusses the possible interventions that can be conducted by nurses at each disaster prevention level.
Primary Prevention
When a disaster occurs, several volunteers and workers may enter into the affected place to give humanitarian and health assistance. A possible nursing intervention at this stage is immunization of the volunteers to prevent them from contracting communicable diseases like measles, pertussis, and mumps among other diseases as they will be interacting with the victims (Nayak, 2015). Such an activity can be done at the impact phase to keep the volunteers safe. The nurses can seek support from agencies like the American Red Cross, which is known globally for providing disaster response services.
Secondary Prevention
Nurses can conduct surveillance and screening to identify other health needs of the disaster population. Ideally, the occurrence of a disaster will enable the nurses to interact with several members of the community, who may be victims, or relatives to the victims (Nayak, 2015). Through such interactions, they can identify other health problems and diseases prevalent in that community, which may require the attention of the government and other healthcare organizations to control.

Surveillance and screening can be done in the impact phase of the earthquake as it is the stage where the nurses interact most with the disaster victims. Besides, nurses can seek help from different research agencies like the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) because they have the right expertise and facilities for conducting community health need assessments.
Tertiary Prevention
After the disaster, nurses can develop follow-up mechanisms to identify victims who might have developed psychological problems as a result of the disaster and provide counseling services to them. Besides, in particular cases, nurses can refer specific victims to professional psychologists for further evaluation and treatment (Shultz et al., 2016). To do this, they can seek assistance from mental health groups and charities like the Depression Alliance and Mental Health Foundation as they have qualified professionals in psychological counseling. Identifying and solving psychological issues among the disaster victims can suitably be done at the post-impact or the recovery phase of the earthquake to restore the residual aspects of the disaster and enable the community members to live a healthy life free from psychological problems.

References
Nayak, N. (2015). Earthquake Aftermath-myth or Reality? Nepal Journal of Epidemiology, 5(2), 465.
Shultz, J. M., Espinola, M., Rechkemmer, A., Cohen, M. A., & Espinel, Z. (2016). 21 Prevention of Disaster Impact and Outcome Cascades.