Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
The Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Aug 28;11(1):4325. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-18072-w.
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.
医院系统在灾难应急响应中治疗伤员方面发挥着至关重要的作用。同时，自然灾害也会阻碍其充分发挥功能。因此，城市必须制定使医院能够有效应对灾难的策略。在这里，我们提出了一种基于评估医院功能丧失并量化地震破坏导致多严重性伤害的模型来评估应急响应的方法。该方法可以为患者转移和救护车及移动手术室的分配设计有效的计划。该方法应用于秘鲁利马，模拟了一场 8.0 级地震后的灾害场景。我们的结果表明，医疗需求的空间分布与医院在地震后的能力不匹配，使得周边地区的大量区域服务严重不足。本研究表明，通过利用医院系统协调的计划可以解决这种需求与能力不匹配的问题，将重伤患者的等待时间缩短两倍以上。
