Knowledge, attitude, and practices about disaster preparedness among resident doctors in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Delhi, India: A cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Disasters pose various challenges to hospitals' functioning during calamities. Resilient health system is the need of the hour. To work as a safe hospital even during disasters, it is important to sensitize, orient, and train doctors and other medical professionals towards disaster preparedness. This study was conducted to study the knowledge, attitudes, and practices about disaster preparedness among resident doctors.

METHODOLOGY: It was a cross-sectional study conducted amongst 363 resident doctors of a tertiary care teaching hospital in Delhi, India. A pretested self-administered semistructured questionnaire was used to gather information. Analysis was done using the SPSS version 21.0 and employing descriptive -statistics.

RESULTS: Mean age of the participants was 28.1 ± 2.8 years. Ninety-four (25.9 percent) study participants were found to have good/excellent knowledge about disaster preparedness, only 16.5 percent (60) had good awareness about the hospital's disaster preparedness, and 306 (84.3 percent) study participants had a favorable attitude towards disaster preparedness. Age and educational qualification were found to be significantly associated with knowledge about disaster preparedness. Only 11.6 percent (42) resident doctors attended any mock drill for disaster preparedness in the past 1 year and less than one-fifth (68, 18.7 percent) received training in disaster preparedness.

CONCLUSION: A majority of study participants had a favorable attitude in spite of inadequate knowledge and aware-ness about disaster preparedness. There is a need to address this mismatch between knowledge and attitude through regular sensitization and retrainings along with frequent practical drills and simulation exercise.