Strengthening and preparing: Enhancing nursing research for disaster management

Nurses are often first line responders in a large scale emergency or disaster. This paper reports an evaluative study of a tailored research capacity building course for nurse delegates from the Asia Pacific Emergency and Disaster Nursing Network (APEDNN). Twenty-three participant delegates from 19 countries attended a three-week course that included learning and teaching about the critique and conduct of research. An outcome of the course was the collaborative design of a study now being implemented in a number of countries with the aim of investigating nurses' preparedness for disaster response. Formal mentoring relationships have also been established between more and less experienced peers and facilitators to provide support in implementing this collaborative study. Overall, participant delegates rated the planning, implementation and content of the course highly. Recommendations from this study include funding a mix of face-to-face and distance mentoring and writing for publication workshops to ensure the sustainability of outcomes from a research capacity building course such as the one described.