Psychological First Aid Training of Nurses For Disaster Preparedness: A Non-Equivalent Control Group Study

The study aimed at evaluating the effects of face-to-face RAPID-PFA on improving nurses’ psychological preparedness; and to evaluate nurses’ self-efficacy, self-esteem, dispositional optimism, trait-anxiety, and PTSD after this PFA training in comparing to a control group. Psychological first aid (PFA) is considered to be an early mental health intervention that mitigates the effect of disasters and trauma. It may be applicable to “empower the public and responders to promote mental well-being and prevent adverse mental health outcomes” for disaster mitigation. The study included 150 nurses (75 nurses for each arm). Gender, age, marital status, and work experience did not show significant differences between groups. The findings of the study indicated that PFA training imposed significant group-by-time effect on psychological preparedness. There were also statistically significant differences between the intervention and control groups with regards to self-efficacy, self-esteem, and optimism at post-test. For imitations, methodologically, quasi-experimental designs that involve non-random selection of samples may lead to biases in relation to treatment effects. The sample size was relatively small, which may decrease statistical power and interfere with the generalization of the results. Furthermore, the results were limited to immediate assessment after the PFA training. The longer-term effects of the PFA training programme are unknown.