About one in six surveyed public health workers said they would not report to work in the event of an influenza pandemic emergency, according to an online survey of more than 1,800 public health employees in Minnesota, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Overall, 16% of the health workers said that they were unwilling to “respond to a pandemic flu emergency regardless of its severity,” according to the findings of the survey, which was conducted from November 2006 to December 2007.
Still, that represents an improvement over the 40% of public health employees who in 2005 said they would be unlikely to report to work under the same pandemic circumstances, according to the researcher team that conducted both surveys (PLoS One 2009 July 24;4:e6365).
Responses from the 1,835 public health employees in the current survey were analyzed using the extended parallel process model, which describes an individual's willingness to follow instructions in an emergency, given that person's perception of a threat and his or her belief in the ability to have a positive impact on the outcome.
Individuals who had a perception of high threat and high efficacy were nearly 32 times more likely to say that they would be willing to report to work during a flu pandemic, compared with individuals who reported a low threat and low efficacy perception.
“These results … reveal a unique opportunity to induce change,” according to the researchers. “The first step is to better educate public heath workers as to their designed roles during this emergency scenario, and then motivate them with an understanding of why this role makes a difference.”
“Employee response is a critical component of preparedness planning, yet it is often overlooked. Our study is an attempt to understand the underlying factors that determine an employee's willingness to respond in an emergency,” said the study's lead investigator, Dr. Daniel Barnett, of the department of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
The study was funded by the CDC's Centers for Public Health Preparedness program, and by the CDC's Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Centers program.