Capacity planning and reconfiguration for disaster-resilient health infrastructure

Disasters are becoming increasingly frequent, calamitous, and expensive. The constant increase of disasters and more exposure of people, facilities, built environment and assets are alarming indicators for strengthening disaster preparedness to response and ensuring that capacity planning are in place for effective response and recovery at emergency level. Ad hoc and an unplanned capacity planning in disaster events can result in further losses or exacerbate the disaster-stricken population. Despite the importance of understanding disaster risk, few empirical studies have been conducted over the last decade in terms of analyzing the factors that determine the public hospitals and healthcare centers effective responses to disasters. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce optimization model for effective restructuring and reformatting of hospital and healthcare facilities under calamitous situations that can be led to human loss reduction. A public hospital complex located in Tehran, Iran has been considered as a real case for resource allocation at the time of a devastating disaster so that it can encounter the sudden surge of injured people. Thmain concern in this hospital is converting the non-emergency wards into the emergency wards and adding extra capacity to the existing ones to enhance the hospital preparedness for effective response. The results show that policymakers can improve the resource planning for costeffectiveness of disaster risk reduction and capability self-assessment. The findings can promote the resilience of hospitals, to ensure that they remain safe, effective and proactive during and after disasters.