Developing Hospital Emergency and Disaster Management Index Using TOPSIS Method

Mohammad Mojtahedi,Suparni Suparni,Riza Yosia Sunindijo,Oktomi Wijaya,Fatma Lestari

doi:10.3390/su13095213

Abstract

Indonesia is a country prone to experiencing natural hazards and disasters, which have frequently damaged public infrastructure, including hospitals. The role of hospitals is crucial to alleviate the impact of disasters. However, there is still a lack of study that analyzes the factors that influence the readiness of hospitals in emergency situations. Filling in this gap, the aim of this paper is to analyze and rank hospitals across West Java and Yogyakarta, Indonesia by the resilience of their emergency management approaches. This research seeks to measure hospital resiliency during emergencies and disasters. Results indicate that the emergency and disaster management coordination, response and disaster recovery planning, communication and information management, logistics and evacuation, human resources, finance, patient care and support services, decontamination and security are key attributes for the decision-making matrix. Based on the Hospital Safety Index tool, this research proposes the Hospital Emergency and Disaster Management (HEDM) index by combining the key attributes and sub-attributes using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) as a multi-attribute decision-making technique. The paper concludes that the anticipated benefits of analyzing the resilience of hospitals by using HEDM is the identification of the most susceptible hospitals based on their levels of readiness and resiliency in areas which are prone to experiencing disasters. This prioritization is important for resource allocation and budget planning.

Highlights

Over the past decades, significant growth in the frequency, scale and intensity of natural hazards including pandemics, wildfires, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, storms and major floods has had devastating impacts on the societies and built environments [1]
Different from the previous two reviews that focus on general disaster preparedness of hospitals, this review focuses on a specific group of health service personnel, i.e., nurses and their preparedness for disaster response
This research has evaluated hospital disaster preparedness in Indonesia and found that Indonesian hospitals are still not adequately prepared despite the fact that the country is notorious for its proneness to disasters

Summary

Introduction

Significant growth in the frequency, scale and intensity of natural hazards including pandemics, wildfires, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, storms and major floods has had devastating impacts on the societies and built environments [1]. The health infrastructures, in developing countries, are vulnerable to the impact of natural hazards [2,3]. Often hospital buildings are damaged by disasters and, as a result, their health service delivery is significantly compromised. Numerous researchers have paid attention to the critical role of hospitals in society to serve injuries in emergency conditions, less attention has been devoted to the preparedness, recovery, and resilience of hospitals [4]. Many hospitals in disaster-prone areas are still unprepared and, as a result, are not functioning during and after disasters [6]

Objectives

Findings

Methods

Conclusion