Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in the perception of disaster issues between disaster directors and general health care providers in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.
Methods: The Gyeonggi provincial committee distributed a survey to acute care facility personnel. Survey topics included awareness of general disaster issues, hospital preparedness, and training priorities. The questionnaire comprised multiple choices and items scored on a 10-point Likert scale. We analyzed the discrepancies and characteristics of the responses.
Results: Completed surveys were returned from 43 (67%) of 64 directors and 145 (55.6%) of 261 health care providers. In the field of general awareness, the topic of how to triage in disaster response showed the greatest discrepancies. In the domain of hospital level disaster preparedness, individual opinions varied most within the topics of incident command, manual preparation. The responses to "accept additional patients in disaster situation" showed the biggest differences (> 21 versus 6~10).
Conclusions: In this study, there were disaster topics with discrepancies and concordances in perception between disaster directors and general health care providers. The analysis would present baseline information for the development of better training programs for region-specific core competencies, knowledge, and skills required for the effective response.
Keywords: competency; disaster preparedness; priority; public health.