Title
Effective plans for hospital system response to earthquake emergencies
Date Issued
01 December 2020
Access level
open access
Resource Type
research article
Author(s)
Stanford University
Abstract
Hospital systems play a critical role in treating injuries during disaster emergency responses. Simultaneously, natural disasters hinder their ability to operate at full capacity. Thus, cities must develop strategies that enable hospitals’ effective disaster operations. Here, we present a methodology to evaluate emergency response based on a model that assesses the loss of hospital functions and quantifies multiseverity injuries as a result of earthquake damage. The proposed methodology can design effective plans for patient transfers and allocation of ambulances and mobile operating rooms. This methodology is applied to Lima, Peru, subjected to a disaster scenario following a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. Our results show that the spatial distribution of healthcare demands mismatches the post-earthquake capacities of hospitals, leaving large zones on the periphery significantly underserved. This study demonstrates how plans that leverage hospital-system coordination can address this demand-capacity mismatch, reducing waiting times of critically injured patients by factors larger than two.
Volume
11
Issue
1
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Salud pĂºblica, Salud ambiental
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85089969582
PubMed ID
Source
Nature Communications
Sponsor(s)
We thank Dr. Maryia Markhvida, Abhinav Bindal, and Jacqueline Li for helping conceptualize the first version of the patient transfer analysis during an emergency response. We also thank professor Sandra Santa Cruz, from the Pontificia Universidad CatĂ³lica del PerĂº for granting access to the hospitals’ seismic vulnerability information, and professor Carlos Zavala and Miguel Estrada from the Centro Peruano-JaponĂ©s de Investigaciones SĂsmicas y MitigaciĂ³n de Desastres (CISMID) and the Universidad Nacional de Inge-nierĂa (UNI) for providing access to the seismic microzonation data in Lima. We thank Dr. Ken Snyder, Dr. Juan Fung, and Dr. Siamak Sattar from NIST for providing valuable feedback for our paper and Jill O’Nan from Stanford University for helpful revision of the paper writing. We acknowledge the financial support by the John A. Blume Fellowship from the Civil Engineering Department at Stanford University. In addition, this research was partially supported by the NSF Grant 1645335. The authors are grateful for their generous support.
Sources of information:
Directorio de ProducciĂ³n CientĂfica
Scopus