Development of a disaster preparedness training program for community leaders: Evidence from Taiwan

Community leaders are vital in enhancing community disaster preparedness through empowerment, consensus-building, and public engagement. Despite existing programs, Taiwan lacks essential elements like disaster risk perception and healthcare responses. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive training program that incorporates community leaders' perspectives to address these gaps. This study utilized a mixed-methods approach in a two-step process to develop a theory-based training program for community leaders. The first step involved developing a disaster preparedness training program, identifying core elements through literature reviews on the contents and the protection motivation theory, and conducting qualitative interviews with community leaders to assess their training needs. In the second step, the content of the developed training program was validated. Suggestions from five male community leaders were integrated into program development, resulting in four major themes: community resource linkage, protection and assistance for vulnerable groups, evacuation and sheltering, and health care. The developed disaster preparedness training program was named the R3_SAF3E training program. Content validity was assessed by five experts, with item-level content validity indexes (I-CVI) and scale-level content validity index/averaging (S-CVI/Ave) both were 1, and scale-level content validity index/universal agreement (S-CVI/UA) was 0.94. This is the first study in Taiwan to integrate the protection motivation theory based on community leaders' disaster preparedness needs. The training program demonstrate strong content validity. The results of this study can be used to plan disaster preparedness training for other programs to assist residents in enhancing their disaster preparedness.