Nurses and Mass Casualty Management: Filling an Educational Gap

Abstract

The International Nursing Coalition for Mass Casualty Education (INCMCE) was formed to facilitate the systematic development of sustainable and scalable educational policies related to mass casualty education and to specifically address the lack of specific mass casualty education in current community health curriculum in schools of nursing. With a focus on education, INCMCE plans to take advantage of new learning sciences and technologies, particularly as they facilitate recall of content under stress that was learned during an earlier period of time. This will also have implications across the continuum of nursing education curriculum. The article also introduces the concept of core competencies in mass casualty education, which was created by INCMCE for all nurses, as well as other competencies for nurses who carry additional disaster response responsibilities.

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