Seismic rehabilitation objectives and a simplified seismic evaluation and design programme for medical equipment in hospitals

From the experience gained from recent earthquakes, it has been recognized that the earthquake resisting capacity of so-called responsibility hospitals for acute services in Taiwan should be upgraded. These hospitals, which have been tasked with the provision of emergency services after major earthquakes, should remain functional with regard to their structures, medical facilities, electricity and water supply, and information services. In order to facilitate the issuing of governmental policies and practical engineering services regarding the seismic upgrading of hospitals, the objective of this paper is to determine the seismic rehabilitation objectives of essential medical equipment and nonstructural components in responsibility hospitals, and further, to propose seismic evaluation and strengthening guidelines. Owing to the onerous work required to improve the seismic performance of various nonstructural components, a simplified programme is established using Microsoft Excel software to execute a preliminary seismic evaluation and retrofit design for individual pieces of medical equipment. Users are asked to fill in blanks with hospital information and the parameters of selected equipment and then the programme identifies the performance objective of each piece of equipment. It also determines whether the equipment should be retrofitted or not. In addition, preliminary designs of post-installation anchor bolts for seismic retrofitting against specified seismic demands can be checked automatically by the programme.