A nurses primary role and responsibility during the event of a disaster is to help witht the triage of patients, assist other healthcare providers in taking care of victims and to administer medical care within their scope of practice. Nurses may be asked to practice outside of their scope of practice as well by other healthcare providers in situations with limited resources, helping to perform procedures that they may not normally perform. It is also their responsibility to assess risk for the community and to support the affected community in any way that they can from a nursing perspective. Their responsibility extends to coordinating care between interdisciplinary members of the healthcare team who are present at the scene or at the treatment center. When disaster hits a hospital, it is their job to promote patient safety and facilitate evacuation or transfer of the patient population.

In a natural disaster, the code of ethics may be somewhat conflicting but in the reality and heat of a situation, in order to take care of the victim, the nurse must first take care and save themselves. The nurse will not be able to fulfill their responsibilities to the patient safely if they themselves are injured or deceased. To compare it to another situation, when on an airplane, in an emergency, we are instructed to place our air mask on ourselves before we help others to get their air mask on. The same principle applies to a nurse in a disaster situation. The nurse must first get out of harm’s way before they can think about their next action to help someone else and be effective at doing so. One example of a situation is if there is a fire, and the nurse gets fire on their clothing, they will need to stop drop and roll to put out the fire on themselves before they can go to save the patient, or else they will burn to death before they have the chance to save someone else’s life.