Increasing Disaster Medical Assistance Teams' Intent to Engage with Specific Hazards

Abstract

To ensure human resource availability for a smooth response during various types of disasters, there is a need to improve the intent of those involved in responding to each hazard type. However, Disaster Medical Assistance Team personnel's intent to engage with specific hazards has yet to be clarified. This study therefore aimed to clarify the factors affecting Disaster Medical Assistance Team members' (n = 178) intent to engage with each type of hazard through an anonymous web questionnaire survey containing 20 questions. Our results show that the intent to engage in disaster response activities was significantly lower for chemical (50), biological (47), radiological/nuclear (58), and explosive (52) incidents compared with natural (82) and man-made hazards (82) (p < 0.01). Multiple regression analysis showed that incentives were the most common factor affecting responders' intent to engage with all hazard types, followed by self-confidence. Thus, creating a system that provides generous incentives could effectively improve disaster responders' intent to engage with specific hazards. Another approach could be education and training to increase disaster responders' confidence. We believe that the successful implementation of these measures would improve the intent of responders to engage with hazards and promote the recruitment of sufficient human resources.

Keywords: disaster; emergency responders; hazard; human resources; intent.

Figure 1

A path diagrammatic representation of the impact of background factors on intent to engage for each hazard. The solid and dashed lines represent a significant positive and negative impact on engagement intent score, respectively.

Figure 2

A path diagrammatic representation of the impact on intent to engage in each hazard based on survey questions. The solid and dashed lines represent a significant positive and negative impact on engagement intent score, respectively.