Assessing the seismic resilience of a healthcare system: A hybrid modeling

Healthcare systems play a key role in providing emergency medical services during earthquake events. However, the healthcare systems themselves are also subjected to the impact of earthquakes. Assessing and enhancing the seismic resilience of healthcare systems contributes to the improved performance of medical rescue during earthquakes. Despite many studies in this field, a methodology for resilience assessment that considers both the pre- and in-hospital rescue phases is still lacking, which makes it challenging to assess the seismic resilience of a healthcare system comprehensively. This paper addresses the gaps by proposing mathematical expressions for the indicators of healthcare system functionalities, developing a hybrid model to simulate and compute the functionalities, and providing methods for resilience assessment. A case study is carried out in China to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge to understand and model the functionality of a healthcare system after an earthquake better. The proposed approach can serve as an effective tool for decision-makers to assess the seismic resilience of a healthcare system comprehensively and to compare the efficacy of different resilience enhancement measures.