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

The psychological first aid (PFA) training programme was modified from the RAPID-PFA, which was developed by Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness. The modified programme was nine hours long and was delivered over five weeks (the first four weeks were two hours long and the last week was 1 hour), with interactive didactic lectures, group discussions, and the addition of simulation simulated role-play exercises based on disaster scenarios relevant to the Palestinian situation. The core competencies of the modified and adopted RAPID-PFA training incorporated the five essential elements of immediate mass trauma intervention (safety, calming, self-and collective efficacy, connectedness, and hope). The PFA trainer who was invited to conduct the training was a licensed psychologist from the organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Doctors of the World, or World Vision, who had extensive experience as an emergency and trauma responder. The trainer attended the online version of RAPID-PFA to understand this version of PFA. The study used a non-equivalent control group design with pre-and post-test. However, simple randomisation was used by drawing two hospitals to allocate the intervention arm, then the other three hospitals to form the control arm ((wait-listed)). To avoid contamination, nurses were allocated either to the intervention or control group by individual hospitals. The study included five hospitals in the Nablus and Ramallah cities in the West Bank, Palestine. Some strategies used during the intervention to ensure fidelity: The researcher assessed whether participated nurses understood the intervention content and how relevant they thought the intervention was to their work (nursing day work), for example, follow-up questions and discussions. The researcher tracked attendance at each session and conducting a pre-posttest to assess their improvement following the intervention. Furthermore, the PFA training was delivered by the same trainer, which ensured training fidelity.