Event-independent resilience assessment of the access to care network at the pre-disaster stage using a spatio-temporal analysis

Abstract

Providing timely access to healthcare is one of the main components of resilient cities and communities. Even without the occurrence of a disaster, the need to access healthcare and the availability of healthcare resources change over time in different areas, so it is crucial to assess the resilience of the access to care network. Previous research on urban infrastructure resilience focused mainly on considering a disaster and its consequences for the performance of systems. This approach limits the generalizability of modeling and assessing resilience to a specific event with considered uncertainties. This research presents a framework to assess the inherent resilience of the access to care network as a complex system at the pre-disaster stage, including the hospital network, population city blocks, access road network, and their interconnections. To conduct this assessment, the availability and accessibility of healthcare resources have been incorporated to establish spatial accessibility, which is compared to the level of need for healthcare. The framework is used for optimizing the system's upgrade decisions under normal operating conditions to improve adaptive static resilience. The methodology and case study illustrate the application of the framework in prioritizing hospitals for upgrading and retrofitting and in urban planning to allocate a location for a new hospital.