Willingness to participate in volunteer emergency service and its influencing factors among college students in Heilongjiang province

Objective To examine the college students' willingness to participate in volunteer emergency service and its influencing factors and to provide evidences for developing effective strategies and intervention measures.Methods A questionnaire survey was conducted among 1 806 students selected with multi-stage random cluster sampling method from 7 universities in Heilongjiang province.General descriptive analysis, χ² test,and multivariate logistic regression were adopted in data analyses.Results Of the college students surveyed,71.1% were willing to provide volunteer emergency service and 33.5% had the experience of participating in volunteer emergency service.The first three volunteer emergency services the students intending to provide were support services to the elderly,the young,the sick,and the injured (69.8%),consolatory visit to victims (62.6%),and material handlings (48.7%).Higher willingness was reported by female students and the students with good health,living in towns or rural areas,with good preparedness for possible emergency (risk awareness and emergency-related attitude,mental status,and behavioral manner),having good knowledge about emergency response,having received emergency training in the previous one year (P<0.05 for all).The results of logistic regression analysis showed that the promoting factors for the willingness to provide volunteer emergency service were female (odds ratio OR=2.067),living in towns or rural areas (OR=1.410),good health condition (OR=1.540),appropriate emergency attitude (OR=1.817),good mental status (OR=1.391),good emergency related behavioral manner (OR=1.457),having emergency management-related knowledge and skills (OR=1.301),and attending emergency management-related training in the previous one year (OR=1.439).Conclusion Volunteer emergency service has been approved and accepted by the most of college students,but the willingness to participate in volunteer emergency service needs to be promoted by conducting education on emergency management.