TY - JOUR
T1 - Effective plans for hospital system response to earthquake emergencies
AU - Ceferino, Luis
AU - Mitrani-Reiser, Judith
AU - Kiremidjian, Anne
AU - Deierlein, Gregory
AU - Bambarén, Celso
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Dr. Maryia Markhvida, Abhinav Bindal, and Jacqueline Li for helping conceptualize the first version of the patient transfer analysis during an emergency response. We also thank professor Sandra Santa Cruz, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú for granting access to the hospitals’ seismic vulnerability information, and professor Carlos Zavala and Miguel Estrada from the Centro Peruano-Japonés de Investigaciones Sísmicas y Mitigación de Desastres (CISMID) and the Universidad Nacional de Inge-niería (UNI) for providing access to the seismic microzonation data in Lima. We thank Dr. Ken Snyder, Dr. Juan Fung, and Dr. Siamak Sattar from NIST for providing valuable feedback for our paper and Jill O’Nan from Stanford University for helpful revision of the paper writing. We acknowledge the financial support by the John A. Blume Fellowship from the Civil Engineering Department at Stanford University. In addition, this research was partially supported by the NSF Grant 1645335. The authors are grateful for their generous support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - Hospital systems play a critical role in treating injuries during disaster emergency responses. Simultaneously, natural disasters hinder their ability to operate at full capacity. Thus, cities must develop strategies that enable hospitals’ effective disaster operations. Here, we present a methodology to evaluate emergency response based on a model that assesses the loss of hospital functions and quantifies multiseverity injuries as a result of earthquake damage. The proposed methodology can design effective plans for patient transfers and allocation of ambulances and mobile operating rooms. This methodology is applied to Lima, Peru, subjected to a disaster scenario following a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. Our results show that the spatial distribution of healthcare demands mismatches the post-earthquake capacities of hospitals, leaving large zones on the periphery significantly underserved. This study demonstrates how plans that leverage hospital-system coordination can address this demand-capacity mismatch, reducing waiting times of critically injured patients by factors larger than two.
AB - Hospital systems play a critical role in treating injuries during disaster emergency responses. Simultaneously, natural disasters hinder their ability to operate at full capacity. Thus, cities must develop strategies that enable hospitals’ effective disaster operations. Here, we present a methodology to evaluate emergency response based on a model that assesses the loss of hospital functions and quantifies multiseverity injuries as a result of earthquake damage. The proposed methodology can design effective plans for patient transfers and allocation of ambulances and mobile operating rooms. This methodology is applied to Lima, Peru, subjected to a disaster scenario following a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. Our results show that the spatial distribution of healthcare demands mismatches the post-earthquake capacities of hospitals, leaving large zones on the periphery significantly underserved. This study demonstrates how plans that leverage hospital-system coordination can address this demand-capacity mismatch, reducing waiting times of critically injured patients by factors larger than two.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-020-18072-w
DO - 10.1038/s41467-020-18072-w
M3 - Article
C2 - 32859917
AN - SCOPUS:85089969582
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 11
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 4325
ER -