Quantification of Seismic Resilience of Health care facilities

Resilience is defined as the ability of engineering and socio-economic systems to rebound after severe disturbances, or disasters, such as earthquakes. This paper presents a comprehensive conceptual framework to quantify resilience including both technical and organizational aspects. An organizational model (metamodel) describing the response of the hospital emergency department has been implemented. The metamodel is able to estimate the hospital capacity and its dynamic response in real time and incorporate the influence of the facility’s damage in structural and non-structural systems on the organizational ones. The waiting time, a measure of efficiency and capability to respond, it is used to evaluate seismic resilience of health care facilities. Its behavior is described using a double exponential function and its parameters are calibrated based on simulated data. The metamodel has been designated to cover a large range of hospital configurations and takes into account hospital resources, in terms of staff and infrastructures, operational efficiency and possible existence of an emergency plan, maximum capacity and behavior both in pre-saturated and saturated conditions