The research article that I looked at was from the Journal of Emergency Nursing, it was research done over Anxiety and Stress in live disaster training. The research looked at senior BSN students and put them in 5 disaster training stations. Before the event they answered a series of questions based on the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). After the event they answered another series of questions from STAI and after they also provided a saliva sample so that their Amylase and Cortisol levels could be assessed for stress levels. Cortisol and Amylase levels are used to measure physiological response to stress. This was done over a 4 day variety of disaster situations, in the quantitative result all cortisol and Amylase levels were within normal limits and there was not a significant increase in the STAI scores. In the qualitative results there was evaluation for preparation, teamwork and performance. The results show that further research is needed as far as managing stress levels during live simulations.
6 Responses
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Do you think it’s possible that the fact that it wasn’t a real disaster contributed to the lack of change to stress hormones? I’d be curious to see the values change in a real disaster situation.
I agree completely, after reading more into the research I really don’t know that it was a great research project. When I started it I thought it was going to be more related to ED nurses not students. It would be interesting to see what the changes would be in an actual disaster.
I would also think that a real emergency would induce greater stress than a mock one. That being said I know personally I feel the more I practice something in a safe environment, i.e. a mock event, the less likely I am to forget something or panic during a real event. This is was nursing does mock codes, practices CPR regularly, etc. I would hypothesize that studying nurses with more experience in certain situations would experience less stress than those with little or no experience. My first code as a nurse was very traumatic but because our hospital made us participate in mock codes quarterly my panic was brief and I was able to regain composure and do my job well. That being said I am sure my cortisol levels were through the roof! It is an interesting topic that deserves more study I feel like this would also be beneficial in the stress response in other high stress fields.
I too feel that the more I practice “mock” situations the more prepared I am for a real emergency and the more likely I am to not panic. I personally have never been a fan of role playing or mock events but I do truly believe that in this field the more that you practice the more comfortable you are in a true emergent situation. I work in a small but busy ED and I really feel that we would benefit with more mock situations than what we do in our facility.
Hi Christine I enjoyed reading you Journal Club Article post. This is a very interesting article and I understand how researching this topic can be beneficial for nurses that are often in stressful nursing situations. I imagine that the aim of this disaster and trauma simulation and training is to elicit a response as similar as possible to the response a person might have in reality. Another study similar to this one utilized EMS physicians and paramedics in the study and monitored their salivary alpha-amylase and cortisol levels both before and after the simulation (Valentin et al., 2015). Salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase levels varied only slightly before and after the simulation and both groups of healthcare professionals had similar results. It would be interesting for future research to focus on a wider variety of participants with different backgrounds in healthcare. After being repeatedly exposed to trauma and emergencies I wonder if a person gets desensitized? Thanks for sharing, great article!
References
Valentin, B., Grottke, O., Skorning, M., Bergrath, S., Fischermann, H., Rörtgen, D., . . . Beckers, S. K. (2015). Cortisol and alpha-amylase as stress response indicators during pre-hospital emergency medicine training with repetitive high-fidelity simulation and scenarios with standardized patients. Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, 23(1). doi:10.1186/s13049-015-0110-6
Thanks for your response, I agree focusing on a wider variety of participants would be a good further research on this. That’s interesting that there was a similar study on EMS physicians and paramedics. Thanks for sharing.