Abstract
There is a need for trained health professionals who can swiftly respond to disasters occurring worldwide. Little is known about whether the currently available programmes in disaster management are in line with the recommendations of expert researchers. Our objective was to qualitatively review the characteristics of European educational programmes in health emergency and disaster management and to provide guidance to help improve their curricula. We carried out an integrative review to extract the main characteristics of the 2020/21 programmes available. We identified 34 programmes, the majority located in Spain, the UK or France. The primary qualification types awarded were master’s degrees, half of them lasting one year, and the most common teaching method was in person. Almost all of the programmes used a virtual university classroom, a third offered multidisciplinary disaster management content and teachers, and half of them employed situational simulations. The quality of European educational programmes in health emergency and disaster management has improved, especially in terms of using more practical and interactive teaching methodologies and in the inclusion of relevant topics such as communication, psychological approaches and evaluation of the interventions. However, generally, the educational programmes in disaster management have not yet incorporated the skills related to the intercultural and interprofessional awareness aspects.
Highlights
The inclusion criteria for the courses considered were (1) postgraduate EPDM; (2) aimed at medical or nursing professionals; (3) available during the 2020/21 academic year; (4) information that could be cross-checked on the university website or upon request by email; (5) information expressed in English, French or Spanish; (6) course delivery by a public or private university; (7) conducted in one of the following European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Hungry, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania); (8) award of a certificate recognised, at minimum, at the national level
EPDM courses directed towards healthcare professionals that were available in the 2020/21 academic year
We aimed to identify whether universities offering EPDMs have improved the quality of their curricula in recent years [61] by incorporating the proposed recommendations that holistic and standardised programmes should have developed [15]
Summary
At a global level, different disaster risk-reduction strategies have been implemented to increase nations’ and communities’
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