A mitigation tool to protect a home health care structure facing a hydrological disaster

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem to face hydrological disasters such as a flood, in a home health care structure. In France, these hospitals deliver mainly home health care by employing liberal nurses and liberal physicians (patients’ referring physicians), but they employ also salaried nurses and salaried physicians to control the quality of cares and to ensure the care continuity, respectively. The cares and the physicians’ consultations are organized through home tour schedules. In the event of a flood, home tours can be compromised depending on home accessibility. A patient home can be easily or hardly accessible and the home care tour can be or not prolonged depending on the time required to reach each patient home. In the case where the patient home is invaded by the water, the patient must be evacuated to a regular hospital or to a field hospital which has been set up temporarily to receive the evacuated patients. In this paper, a decision-making tool is proposed to face the hydrological disaster i.e. to decide: which patients must be evacuated, which resources must be used to keep patients at home, and how many beds are required to host the evacuated patients. With such a tool, home health care structures can initiate the required collaborations in order to be ready to respond to such emergency crisis and plan patient evacuations during the flood.