3 - (SYM 6) Piloting a Decision-making Tool to Assess Post-disaster Readiness to Respond Among Youth-serving Professionals

The ability of communities to support youth post-disaster relies not only on the supply of adequately trained responders, but also their readiness and willingness to serve in responder roles. Healthcare research has found tremendous variability in provider willingness to respond post-disaster (e.g., one review found between 23.1–95.8% of healthcare workers were willing to work during an influenza pandemic, Aoyagi et al., 2015). However, studies of disaster mental health have almost entirely focused on responder confidence and ability (e.g., knowledge and confidence; Allen et al., 2010; Movahed et al., 2023; Wade et al., 2013), with little attention to actual feasibility of responding. Psychological First Aid (PFA; Brymer et al., 2006), which is among the most widely disseminated disaster mental health trainings and grounded in cognitive-behavioral principles, includes a discussion of factors for providers to consider before engaging in disaster relief work (e.g., caregiving responsibilities, medical needs, ability to leave work). In this presentation, we describe the development of a new Readiness to Respond Tool that mirrors content in the PFA Operations Guide (Brymer et al., 2006) and asks trainees to answer questions about barriers to responding and the importance of those barriers. Development included obtaining expert feedback and adapting items. Subsequently, 286 participants in disaster mental health trainings completed the tool. The most common barriers were (1) concern that the disaster might remind responders of prior loss (37.2%), (2) households being unprepared for the responder to assume unknown risk (34.3%), and (3) support systems unprepared for responder absence from responsibilities (31.8%). However, the barriers most important to likelihood of response were (1) support systems being unprepared for responder absence from responsibilities (50.0%), (2) family/household unprepared for absence (44.9%), and (3) employers not allowing leave time (42.0%). Respondents reported that they found the Readiness to Respond Tool to be very (56.6%) or somewhat (19.1%) useful as a decision-making tool as they considered responding to disaster.