Abstract
Hospital disaster resilience can be defined as “the ability of hospitals to resist, absorb, and respond to the shock of disasters while maintaining and surging essential health services, and then to recover to its original state or adapt to a new one.” This article aims to provide a framework which can be used to comprehensively measure hospital disaster resilience. An evaluation framework for assessing hospital resilience was initially proposed through a systematic literature review and Modified-Delphi consultation. Eight key domains were identified: hospital safety, command, communication and cooperation system, disaster plan, resource stockpile, staff capability, disaster training and drills, emergency services and surge capability, and recovery and adaptation. The data for this study were collected from 41 tertiary hospitals in Shandong Province in China, using a specially designed questionnaire. Factor analysis was conducted to determine the underpinning structure of the framework. It identified a four-factor structure of hospital resilience, namely, emergency medical response capability (F1), disaster management mechanisms (F2), hospital infrastructural safety (F3), and disaster resources (F4). These factors displayed good internal consistency. The overall level of hospital disaster resilience (F) was calculated using the scoring model: F = 0.615F1 + 0.202F2 + 0.103F3 + 0.080F4. This validated framework provides a new way to operationalise the concept of hospital resilience, and it is also a foundation for the further development of the measurement instrument in future studies.
Highlights
Disasters including extreme weather events, natural disasters, bioterrorism, and pandemics are having an increased global impact [1]
The value of the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy (KMO) in the current study is 0.792, which is over the threshold of 0.7
The domain scores were used as the independent variable for component extraction
Summary
Disasters including extreme weather events, natural disasters, bioterrorism, and pandemics are having an increased global impact [1]. Hospital resilience is an emerging concept that has been added into the hospital disaster management context [2,8,9,10,11,12] It can be defined as “the ability of hospitals to resist, absorb, and respond to the shock of disasters while maintaining and surging essential health services (e.g., on-site rescue, pre-hospital care, emergency health treatment, critical care, decontamination and isolation), and to recover to its original state or adapt to a new one.” [10]. It implies a comprehensive perspective of a hospital’s ability to cope with disasters, including inherent strength (ability to resist and absorb disasters) and adaptive flexibility (strategies to maintaining and surging essential health services and adaptation for future disasters) [13,14,15]
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