Decision support for single and multi-hospital evacuation and emergency response -

Abstract

This paper studies hospital evacuation planning which is a crucial part of a hospital's emergency management plan. During the evacuation of a hospital, patients must be moved from the building to a staging area, where they wait until they can be loaded onto a vehicle and transported to alternate care facilities. Patients need assistance and medical care throughout this process, and the level of care and assistance they require is dependent on the patient's condition. Furthermore this process must be accomplished under limited resources, such as medical transport teams and vehicle fleet size among others. We develop two evacuation models, the first model deals with the evacuation of a single hospital, while the second model deals with the simultaneous evacuation of several hospitals. In both models the objective will be to minimize the cumulative transportation and threat risks of the patients. The patients in the evacuating hospital would require aid from the staff in order to be moved to the staging area, and then moved outside the building where they will be loaded to the available vehicles. So the hospital building evacuation and the patient’s transportation to the receiving hospitals are dependent. The resulting models are integer programs, with complex structure. The first case study will be based on the evacuation of a large regional hospital. The second case study will be based on the evacuation of several hospitals that reside within the same area. We then discuss some performance measures related to the models’ objective functions and the optimal values simulated by the models.