Disaster resilient hospitals: an essential for all-hazards emergency preparedness.

Abstract

Hospitals and health facilities play a crucial role in providing health services for their communities, in particular during crises and emergencies. Well prepared and disaster resilient hospitals are therefore essential to be able to meet the increased demands for life saving services in large scale emergencies, which can quickly overwhelm the surge capacity and functional safety of the hospitals and of the health system at large. The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed tools like the Hospital Safety Index, the WHO Regional Office for Europe's Hospital emergency response checklist and Toolkit for assessing health-system capacity for crisis management to assisst emergency managers to assess the structural and functional safety of health facilities, to enhance emergency preparedness to respond effectively to the most likely disaster scenarios and to strengthen overall health system preparedness with an all-hazards approach through fostering the crisis management capacities of hospitals. This article briefly introduces these WHO tools and provides an overview of their implementation and roll out in Member States of the WHO European Region.