Health Professionals of Emergency Service: an Evaluation of Disaster Medicine and Ethical Values

Abstract

Aim: To obtain the opinions of health professionals' who work in emergency medical services on the application of basic attitudes like triage, ethics, legal rules; to popularize problems they have encountered or may experience while giving health services after natural disasters; and to develop further suggestions. Material and method: In order to evaluate health service problems, laws, triage and ethics applications, a questionnaire tool was formulated. The poll that was taken included 133 emergency service workers, with and without earthquake experiences. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics with statistical significance set at p<0.001. The frequency distributions taken into account and chi square test were applied to understand the difference between the employees who experienced an earthquake and the employees who did not. Findings: 57.7% of participants in the survey were males and 42.3% females. Their average age was 29.8 %. 16.8% of them worked in the university hospital, 77.4 % in a state hospital and 5.8% in private hospitals. 51.1% of the participants were doctors, 43.1% nurses and 5.8% emergency medical technicians. 48.2% of the participants had experienced earthquakes, 52.6% had not. 27% of them were consulted on triage, 37.2% on both triage and legal rules, 31.4% on triage, laws and ethics and 4.4% on triage and ethical principles. Conclusion: Results show that while ethical principles are less considered in medical services after natural disasters, triage and legal regulations play an essential role in resource allocation and medical service presentation. The results show that the inclusion of ethical training in natural disaster medicine education and its enhancement through regular rehearsals is essential.