Medical staff´s awareness of emergencies in selected health care facilities

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to evaluate the extent to which health care personnel from selected South Bohemia region health care facilities is prepared to emergency situation. The research has been conducted in 7 largest health care facilities in South Bohemia region at Hospital České Budějovice, Plc., Hospital Tábor, Plc., Hospital Jindřichův Hradec, Plc., Hospital Český Krumlov, Plc., Hospital Strakonice, Plc., Hospital Písek, Plc., Hospital Prachatice, Plc.. Since within these health care facilities, there are present thousands of patients on daily basis, there is, without any shadow of doubt, need for each member of health care personnel to be well informed not only about possible emergency situations but also about how general public is warned when an emergency situation takes place and also how to behave when these emergency situations happen. The theoretical framework focuses on emergency situations. It contains the definition of emergency situations as it is defined by Act 239/2000 Coll., on Integrated Rescue System, where the emergency situations are outlined and there are also mentioned the causing factors. Based on the information from Regional emergency plan there are described some emergency situations in further detail. For example these emergency situations can be floods, that are one of the most common emergency situation from the past years in South Bohemia region, emergency situations caused by radiation, conflagrations, leakage of dangerous chemical substances, disease outbreaks or terrorism, which is the threat that is to be taken more and more seriously based on current development in Europe. The theoretical framework also describes health care facilities. There is described the term of "health care facility" as defined by Act 372/2011 Coll., on Health Care Services Quality. In order to emphasize the importance of public protection in health care facilities, there is also a summary of the number of health care facilities in the Czech Republic. The next chapter of theoretical framework mentions more detailed information about individual hospitals selected for the research on health care personnel knowledgeableness. To answer the research question "How familiar is health care personnel from selected health care facilities from the area of South Bohemia region with the cause of emergency situation?" a large questionnaire study has been conducted from each of the 7 selected hospitals. The results have been evaluated and depicted using Microsoft Excel software. The statistical evaluation has been done by using ANOVA method that compared the relation between respondents' final score and individual criteria (gender, age, highest educational level within hospital where respondent worked). The results of the survey show that the average familiarity of health care personnel is capped at 72.74 %. The researcher set 80% passing limit which means that the level of familiarity is unsatisfactory. The questions category, with the lowest score (59.24%), is population protection. Since 79.5 % of respondents do not know what the warning signal "General warning" sounds like, there is a need for regular training of health care personnel on Public protection. In the areas where there are regular trainings provided by law there are significantly better results. To give an example, in the area of fire protection, there have been 74.37 % of questions answered correctly on average. Whilst this is still below the passing rate (80%), as defined by researcher, the results are significantly better when compared with other question areas, which shows that regular training increases employees´ knowledge. Other results showed the correlation between individual characteristics and overall performance. In conclusion, the health care personnel does not have satisfactory amount of information, which means that there is a need to set rules and framework for regular trainings on public protection for health care professional