Disaster Resilience of hospitals considering emergency ambulance services

Abstract

The paper presents a new methodology to evaluate functionality and resilience of healthcare facilities considering the effect of the ambulance service during extreme events such as earthquakes. The main parameter considered to measure functionality is the waiting time of the injured person, before receiving assistance considered directly from its initial location after the extreme event. The damage of the road network and the distance of the injured person from the hospital is considered in the model, therefore interdependency between the hospital network and the road network is taken in account in the model. Finally the proposed methodology has been tested using different case studies to evaluate performances and weaknesses of the system and of the used dispatching policies.