TOMODACHI J&J Disaster Nursing Training Program 2023：Post Trip Seminar and Project Event
On September 23 and 24, 2023, the “TOMODACHI J&J Disaster Nursing Training Program” post-training was held in Hyogo. On the morning of the first day, participants visited the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution (DRI). Through a variety of exhibits and videos about the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, the participants learned about the situation at that time, disaster prevention prudence, and activities that the city is undertaking after the earthquake. Many of the materials provided hints for the themes to be introduced at the project presentation. The students eagerly took notes and brought the materials back home with them.
In the afternoon, the participants visited the Hokudan Earthquake Memorial Park and Nojima Fault Preservation Museum on Awaji Island. The director of the Nojima Fault Preservation Museum, who himself experienced the earthquake, gave a lecture on the earthquake in the Hokudan area. The participants were deeply moved by the director’s vivid description of what it was like at that time and his powerful and emotional speech.
On the second day, the participants visited the University of Hyogo’s Research Institute of Nursing Care for People and Community, where they attended a lecture on evacuation centers, set up an evacuation center on a desk, and experienced evacuation center management based on a simulation. The participants were divided into teams and engaged in various discussions in order to make decisions on who to evacuate and where to evacuate them, given the limited resources, facilities and the inability to evacuate everyone. In the evacuation center management experience, each student took on a role and simulated how to deal with victims who were brought in one after another.
Mayu Yoneyama commented, “When there was a person who collapsed, we were able to respond immediately because we had guidance, but it took time to transport the person even after calling for help, so it was difficult to divide the roles. It was hard to draw a line between highly specialized and non-specialized fields,” she said.
On October 21st, about one month after the post-training session, a project presentation event was held at Johnson & Johnson’s headquarters in Tokyo. The program provides not only lectures and excerices, it also aims to provide oppoerutnities for students to apply what they learned in the program to communities, by planning and implementing team projects. In addition to presentations by cohort’s team, the event included a disaster prevention game by the Japan Society of Disaster Nursing Student Association. Misa Negishi,a 2021 program cohort founded the association. Then the participants listened to a video lecture by Dr. Margaret Quinn of Rutgers College of Nursing in New Jersey, USA. We had the opportunity to visit her during the program’s U.S. trip. At the end there was a panel discussion by the 3.11 Memorial Network and Peace Winds Japan. Thanks to the efforts of the program cohort to widely advertise the event, more than 70 people registered to participate in the event. Reflecting on the event, Mao Ishizu said,”The past two and a half months of student involvement in everything from planning to executing the event have been a very valuable experience for us. It was not easy to cover everything we learned in pre-trip seminars, U.S. trip, and post-training, and present in 50 minutes, and also to meet the needs of the participants, but it was fun to work on the project as a team by having discussions over and over, and making revisions in order to improve our presentation. I will never forget the feeling of accomplishment I had when I successfully completed the project on the day of the event.”
With only one month left in the program, the students are steadily preparing for the final debriefing on December 10, which will be the culmination of their work.
