nurses’ preparedness for disasters in a crisis-stricken country: a case study in afghanistan, in 2020

Background: nurses play an essential role in the hospital rsquo;s response to accidents and disasters. assessing nurses rsquo; preparedness is the starting point to improve and increase their preparedness for disasters. therefore, this study aimed to investigate the preparedness of nurses of a 650bed district hospital in herat, afghanistan in the face of disasters in 2020. materials and methods: this was a crosssectional study, and the study subjects included all nurses working in a 650bed district hospital in herat province. the data collection tool was a standard questionnaire to determine the level of preparedness of nurses against accidents and disasters, which was localized. this questionnaire included three areas of knowledge, attitude, and performance. the maximum score in each of the domains was 100. to analyze the data, descriptive indicators, such as mean, median, standard deviation, and quartiles, and analytical methods such as independent ttest, 1way analysis of variance, the mannwhitney and friedman nonparametric tests, and the spearman correlation coefficienttest were used. results: the mean ±sd scores obtained by the participants in each of the areas of knowledge, attitude, and performance (behavior) were 30 ±12, 81 ±12, and 40 ±7, respectively. the study rsquo;s findings showed a statistically significant relationship between knowledge score and the duration of disaster education and management history. also, a statistically significant association was observed between performance and variables of age, gender, marital status, education level, work experience, management history, duration of training received on disasters, and history of previous disaster exposure. conclusion: considering that the preparedness of nurses participating in this study was lower than average in two of the three areas, the level of preparedness of nurses for disasters is low and undesirable and requires measures, such as holding regular theoretical and practical training courses to increase it.