The effects of a community-based disaster drill of simulating disaster medical assistance team (DMAT) on the knowledge and attitudes

BACKGROUND: We evaluated the effects of community-based disaster drill of simulating disaster medical assistance team on the knowledge and the attitudes. METHODS: Eight hours disaster drills, including didactic lectures, table simulation, and outdoor field simulation, were developed for participants who were recruited from community health centers, emergency departments, fire stations, emergency medical tech-nicians’ academy, and emergency information center in the Seoul Metropolitan City area from 2006 to 2008. We surveyed on the knowledge and the attitude using designed questionnaire before and after drill. We compared changes using t-test and repeated mea-sure ANOVA. RESULTS: In this study, 14 community-based drills were performed and 525 (79.4%) people responded to both pre-and post-drill survey. Of these, the doctor was the second common occupation (26.9%) after volunteer students (47.1%). Overall, knowledge and attitude score significantly increased from 3.9±1.0 to 4.3±0.9 (p<0.001) and from 21.4±3.4 to 22.4±3.2 (p<0.001), respectively. The difference among professional license groups between pre-and post-drill knowledge level was significant (p=0.03), while the difference among jobs for attitude between pre-and post-drill was not different (p=0.78). CONCLUSION: Disaster drills on the establishment and operation of DMAT may affect both knowledge and attitude of participants positively.