Developing a scale to determine disaster preparedness perceptions of the personnel working in pre-hospital emergency health services: A methodological study

In this study, it is aimed to develop a scale in line with Structural Equation Modeling that can evaluate the disaster preparedness perceptions of the personnel working in prehospital emergency health services in a valid and reliable way. An item pool consisting of 71 items was created by the researcher in line with the literature on disaster and emergency preparedness. This item pool was presented to the relevant expert's opinion and after the evaluations, a draft scale form consisting of 55 items was created. The draft scale form was applied to 312 personnel working in the pre-hospital emergency health services of Erzincan and Tunceli Provincial Health Directorates between April 2021 and May 2021. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 24.0 program. A strong and positive relationship was found between the first and second answers given by the participants to the scale statements (r=0.768, p<0.001). As a result of item-total correlation, the number of items decreased to 52. Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analyzes were conducted to determine the construct validity of the draft scale. Since the Kaiser Meyer Olkin value of the draft scale was >0.6 and the Bartlett's test value was p<0.05, it was determined that it was suitable for exploratory factor analysis, and a five-factor structure was obtained as a result of the analysis. Factors were named as "Willing", "Importance", "Self-Efficacy", "Intervention Skill" and "Benefit". This five-factor structure was tried to be verified by confirmatory factor analysis and as a result of the analysis, the 'Disaster Preparedness Perception Scale of the Personnel Working in Pre-Hospital Emergency Health Services' consisting of 28 items was obtained. The Cronbach's Alpha value of the scale is very high at 0.925, and this value varies between 0.834 and 0.926 among the sub-dimensions. An increase in the score obtained from the scale indicates that there is a better perception of disaster preparedness. The scale can be used as a scale that can evaluate the disaster preparedness level of the personnel working in pre-hospital emergency health services.