Title
A New Relative Risk Index for Hospitals Exposed to Tsunami
Date Issued
31 March 2021
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Baiguera M.
Rossetto T.
Dias P.
Lopez-Querol S.
Siriwardana C.
Hasalanka H.
Ioannou I.
Robinson D.
University College London
Publisher(s)
Frontiers Media S.A.
Abstract
The failure of hospitals in recent tsunami have caused extensive social and economic losses. A simple but quantitative approach is required to assess the resilience of healthcare systems to tsunami, which relates not only to hospital building integrity, but also to maintaining hospital functionality. This paper proposes a new tsunami relative risk index (TRRI) that quantifies the impact of tsunami on critical units, (e.g. Intensive Care Unit, Maternity Ward, etc) in individual hospitals, as well as the impact on service provision across a network of hospitals. A survey form is specifically developed for collecting of field data on hospitals for the TRRI evaluation. In its current form TRRI is designed for hospital buildings of reinforced concrete construction, as these are the building types most commonly used worldwide for housing critical units. The TRRI is demonstrated through an application to three hospitals located along the southern coast of Sri Lanka. The TRRI is evaluated for three potential tsunami inundation events and is shown to be able to identify issues with both the building and functional aspects of hospital critical units. Three “what-if” intervention scenarios are presented and their effect on the TRRI is assessed. Through this exercise, it is shown that the TRRI can be used by decision makers to simply explore the effectiveness of individual and combined interventions in improving the tsunami resilience of healthcare provision across the hospital system.
Volume
9
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Medicina clínica
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85104198192
Source
Frontiers in Earth Science
ISSN of the container
22966463
Sponsor(s)
University College London
University of Moratuwa
Ministry Of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus