Dynamic Resilience Assessment for Urban Healthcare Infrastructure Operations Considering the Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Public Health Emergencies
Publication: Journal of Management in Engineering
Volume 40, Issue 6
Abstract
Healthcare infrastructure (HI) is essential for ensuring access to quality medical services, controlling diseases, and enhancing human health and the overall livability of cities. As public health emergencies such as COVID-19 pose considerable challenges, effectively assessing and enhancing the resilience of HI operations has become imperative. Notably, public health emergencies exhibit significant spatial and temporal variability, and HI is a complex system comprising multiple units with various interactions such as geographic relationships and social cooperation, which need to be carefully considered in resilience assessment. This study proposes an integrated framework for dynamic resilience assessment of HI operations, considering spatiotemporal characteristics of emergencies and multiple interrelations among healthcare facilities. First, an improved susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed-hospitalized-Fangcang-dead model was developed to simulate various scenarios across different epidemic phases, given the spatial heterogeneity in outbreak locations and temporal variability in transmission capacity. Furthermore, considering the multiple interrelations among hospitals, the complex HI network was constructed by integrating geographic locations and social cooperation. Finally, under various outbreak scenarios, the cascading failure process of HI was accurately simulated to dynamically assess resilience during different time periods of the epidemic. The proposed method was applied to assess the resilience of HI operations during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, demonstrating its effectiveness and applicability. It was found that 38% of the hospitals in the entire HI system experienced failure during the initiation phase of the epidemic, and this percentage rose to 78% during the acceleration phase. Moreover, HI’s operational resilience presented obvious variations among different outbreak scenarios. Dynamic resilience assessment under various epidemic scenarios can inform the development of targeted optimization strategies for improving HI’s operational resilience, encompassing pre-emergency prevention, during-emergency response, and postemergency restoration. Our study provides valuable insights into enhancing HI’s operational resilience, which has obvious strengths in supporting the optimization of management strategies during public health emergencies.
Practical Applications
Healthcare infrastructure (HI) plays a vital role in crisis response for the prevention and control of epidemics. Accurately assessing and improving the operational resilience to public health emergencies is crucial for maintaining the reliable services they provide. This study proposes an integrated framework for dynamic resilience assessment of HI operations, carefully considering both the spatiotemporal characteristics of emergencies and the multiple interrelations among healthcare facilities. Based on dynamic assessment of HI’s operational resilience under various epidemic scenarios, targeted optimization and management strategies can be developed for resilience improvement throughout the entire process, regarding pre-emergency prevention, during-emergency response, and postemergency restoration. The proposed framework offers a fine-grained assessment of the dynamic evolution of HI’s operational resilience and emphasizes the critical role of infrastructure network construction and emergency scenario setting in resilience planning and risk management. This study provides valuable guidance for creating optimal system configuration and emergency response strategies that can be implemented to foster the resilience of HI.
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Data Availability Statement
Data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Specific data available include patient data and healthcare infrastructure data used in this study.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars of China (Grant No. 72122007) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos. 72071089 and 71821001).
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© 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jan 24, 2024
Accepted: May 23, 2024
Published online: Aug 12, 2024
Published in print: Nov 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Jan 12, 2025
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Analysis (by type)
- Architectural engineering
- Buildings
- Business management
- Disaster preparedness
- Disaster risk management
- Emergency management
- Engineering fundamentals
- Epidemic and pandemic
- Facilities (by type)
- Failure analysis
- Health care facilities
- Infrastructure
- Infrastructure resilience
- Practice and Profession
- Public administration
- Public health and safety
- Social factors
- Structural engineering
- Structures (by type)
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