Editorial review: Development of an "all-hazards" hospital disaster preparedness training course utilizing multi-modality teaching

The development and evaluation of an "all-hazards" hospital disaster preparedness training course is the focus of this practical study. The authors evaluated a hospital-based course that uses a combination of learning approaches
including lectures, skill development sessions, and exercises to teach hospital
disaster preparedness. Evaluation of such courses provides important information
for the development of more evidence-based teaching programs, though many evaluations focus solely on students' evaluation of satisfaction with the quality of teaching, teaching arrangements, and resources. Frequently, and perhaps inevitably, evaluations of student satisfaction results in highly positive findings and the benefits of such evaluation may be limited to the implementation of minor changes to courses in response to feedback provided by students. In this case, the authors considered measures of student outcome and utilized a pre-test and post-test design to highlight the increase in knowledge obtained through participation in the training course, i.e., they have addressed an important objective of course evaluation. That is, to determine if the course has achieved its objectives and resulted in a measurable increase in knowledge and skills of the participants.