ABSTRACT
We would like to express our gratitude to Maria Gkika for sharing her experience in the case study and our teacher As. Prof. Panagiota Sourtzi whose stimulating suggestions and encouragement helped us to accomplish this review.
Intoduction: Today’s nurses, in the framework of international humanitarian missions, are called on to provide care for individuals, families, and people of different cultural backgrounds. In order to respond effectively in this very important role, they are required to have knowledge of nursing theories and models emanating mainly from the fields of Disaster Nursing and Transcultural Nursing, which when rightly combined can be applied to wide scale disasters.
Data Sources: Sources of information include Electronic Libraries and Databases such as: Medline, Cinahl and Google.
Bibliography Review: A number of nursing theories and models that can have relevance for Disaster Nursing emerged from the bibliographic review. Models that have been formed specifically for the guidance of nurses so that they are capable of comprehending the content and the significance of Disaster Nursing, and models that describe significances different from those of Disaster Nursing which can be used in real situations if they are approached from the appropriate perspective. Important also are the models that refer to the development of cultural competence in nurses, such as the comprehension of culture of the population that has been affected and has requested humanitarian assistance.
Conclusions: Undeniably, in a multinational – multicultural environment there is an intense need for cultural competence to deal properly with mass causality incidences. The combination of models and theories is the better choice in disaster nursing so that the objective is achieved as well as the desirable result. After the application of the selected model is applied in this particular nursing situation, the evaluation will determine whether ultimately this model was indeed the correct choice.
Keywords: Nursing Theories, Nursing Models, Disaster Nursing, Cross-cultural nursing, Cultural Competence.
