Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. It is important that the nurses are able to give the best treatment during the acute phase of the disaster, but more importantly also able to prepare the family in managing the impact of disaster before the help arrived. It is necessary that the nursing competencies able to develop nurses ability to give direct services and improve the communities’ readiness. A systematic review is conducted to identify nurse’s competencies in disaster preparedness as well as factors affecting competencies and strategy to improve it.

Literature searching process was conducted through https://remote-lib.ui.ac.id. with keywords of emergency nurses OR nursing AND disaster AND emergency response was performed in PROQUEST and SCIENCE DIRECT and resulted in 12 articles and 2 dissertations. The result identified that role ambiguity caused by variety in type/level of nurses, the complexity of practice, and disaster nursing was yet not  to be a focus in nursing education. The varied contents were usually labelled as ’emergency and disaster preparedness’ which emphasized on capacity to manage physical emergency conditions. It reported proper knowledge about roles among nurses yet lack in skill and situation of real disaster preparedness. This issue should be taken into consideration as it may affect nurse’s competence during disaster situation.

Key words: disaster nurse; nursing competencies; disaster preparedness