Abstract

Background: Our world has events that generally turn into crises. Hospitals and health centers staff are directly affected by crises. Since the nurses provide the most health care services in hospitals in times of crisis, in this study, the knowledge of nurses about crisis management and related factors in a Hospital in 2009 was assessed.

Methods: This study was a cross sectional and descriptive research. All of nurses were selected. Data collection instrument was a questionnaire including questions about demographic characteristics of nurses and their level of knowledge about crisis management in four dimensions of education, management, business and security. Each dimension has four questions with likert scale with five items including: never, low, intermediate, high and extreme. It was validated using content validity and its reliability was assessed through Cronbach's alpha equal to 0.88. For data analysis spss13 software and descriptive and analytic statistics methods were used.  

Results: Data analysis showed that 91.9% of participants in this study were female and their average age was 32.87 ± 7.64 years. The knowledge of 3.2% of nurses about crisis management was in extreme level, 16.6% was in high level, 52.3% was in intermediate level and 27.9% was in low level. In assessing the statistical relationship, there was a direct correlation between education levels, participating in crisis maneuvers and the crisis committee membership with the knowledge of crisis management (p <0.05).

Conclusions: Since promoting the knowledge of staff in health centers for managing unexpected crises is very important, following up and expanding the crisis committee practices and accurate notification in this field is essential.

Key words: crisis management, knowledge, nurse