Indicator Based Framework To Quantify Hospital Resilience

This paper addresses the crucial issue of quantifying the resilience of hospitals. Hospitals are critical infrastructures within health systems which must be able to provide service when disruptive events occur, thus they need to be resilient. The aim of this paper is to present a novel indicator-based framework for quantifying the resilience of hospitals, where the indicator values are explicitly connected to the provided service. Qualitative research methods were used to develop the framework, namely literature review and expert opinion. The framework is built upon the following steps: conceptualizing the hospital system, setting service measures, developing resilience indicators, estimating resilience against a specific disruptive event. The hospital system has been conceptualized into four key parts: staff, stock and supplies, space, system, emphasizing their interconnectedness. Twenty resilience indicators describe the essential features of a resilient hospital, regardless of the hazard type, while a set of service measures are used to quantify resilience. Hospital administrators and supervisory organizations can use the results of this paper to rapidly assess hospital resilience, or they can customize the proposed framework by changing service measures and adapting the indicators according to their needs. Finally, they can use the framework to clearly point out the weaknesses to ensure that improvement actions will have the largest possible impact in terms of resilience. Future applications are needed to test the validity of the framework and they may require adjustments to align with the context and the disruptive event of interest.