The authors developed an evaluation tool to measure changes in exercise participants' awareness of disaster risk and their disaster preparedness behaviors. To create the tool, a mechanism was modeled to visualize the process of changing people's crisis awareness and behavior and questions were developed for each of the twelve factors and two outcomes within the mechanism. In this study, we conducted a disaster exercise in the pharmacy department of Hospital A, one of the disaster base hospitals, and measured the effectiveness of the exercise using the tool.

In the disaster exercise, participants were asked to perform dispensing tasks on five dummy prescriptions using actual medicines, based on the assumption that the dispensing support system was out of order due to a major earthquake. Participants were paired up and dispensed as much as possible within a time limit of 30 minutes. Pre- and post-education sessions were conducted before and after the exercise. Respondents were asked to score each question on a 5-point scale at three time points: before the pre-education, immediately after the disaster exercise, and after post-education.

59 people, including 16 participants, responded to the questionnaire using the evaluation tool. The analysis of the evaluation results revealed that the disaster exercise increased the participants' crisis awareness. Furthermore, participants improved their scores on the questions on feelings of anxiety about the current situation, assumptions about the impact, sense of ownership, and fear of not acting, but no change was observed among non-participants. However, there was no significant difference in scores between the two groups regarding whether they had taken action for disaster preparedness in the period following the exercise.

The exercise raised the participants' crisis awareness, but did not encourage them to change their behavior. Future research should consider ways to encourage staff members to take action to prepare for disasters.