Healthcare in disasters

The disaster stream at Monash University Nursing and Midwifery involves two units. Both units are elective and come under the Masters of Advanced Nursing program. These units are:

Health professional leadership during disasters (12cp)

This unit introduces you to disaster health management and the role of leadership within the multidisciplinary healthcare workforce during a disaster incident.

In this unit you will:

• examine effective health professional leadership decision–making, and review government policies and guidelines including risk assessment and business continuity planning.
• explore disaster preparedness in multiple healthcare settings, and gain an understanding of the importance of educating future health professionals in disaster preparedness.

In addition, as a graduate student, you will immerse in learning opportunities designed to expand your skills in critical thinking, problem solving, evidence-based practice, and clinical decision making. You will also be exposed to core concepts associated with research including literature searching, critique of contemporary research, referencing and advanced academic writing skills.

Disaster management in healthcare (6cp)

This unit will introduce you, a health professional to the role you play in emergency preparedness and disaster management in local and international settings.

Areas of focus include:

• Your role in planning,
• partnerships,
• disaster response,
• delivery of services.

These units involve flexible learning on campus at Peninsula as well as online delivered synchronically. Each unit involves four tutorials of three hours each throughout the semester. There is other work that students perform online incorporating pre-class and wrap up tutorial readings and activities. The difference in the credit points reflects the amount of work required, and the length of assessment tasks.

Topics include classifications and severity ratings of disaster events, and universal theoretical frameworks of impact mitigation concepts. Students will learn to assess the leadership skills needed when striving for disaster resilience, and understand the differences between roles of command, control and collaboration. Global Disaster Risk Reduction concepts, Safe Hospital Indexes, and international council of nurse core competencies in disaster nursing will be explored.

You will gain an understanding of the concepts of crisis management. This involves examining qualities of leadership skills required during risk adverse and high consequence impacts, how professionals communicate, prioritise, risks stratify and apply governmental policies and guidelines to healthcare settings. Most importantly you will learn to promote and educate future health professionals on how to change from everyday nursing to the next level of advanced practice during the need to respond to disaster events.

On successful completion, you will be eligible to graduate with a Graduate certificate of advanced nursing.

Should you wish to undertake further study and progress toward a higher qualification, pathways exist for you to continue your education in a Graduate Diploma or Master of Advanced Nursing. Further information is available in the course handbook.