Component Fragilities and System Performance of Health Care Facilities

Abstract

Hospitals belong to the so-called "complex-social" systems since they depend on several components of different nature to function properly and they provide a societal service to citizens. The basic components of a hospital are: the staff, the organization and the facility. They jointly "contribute" to provide medical care to patients. This chapter focus on the seismic assessment of the facility. A hospital has to be capable of providing medical after the occurrence of a major earthquake; hence the facility target performance is set as operational. Such a performance depends on the response of both structural and non-structural elements. Fragility curves for "typical" non-structural elements are provided. A probabilistic-based procedure for the evaluation of the fragility curve of the facility is then derived. Finally, an index adequate to measure the performance of the hospital under emergency condition is proposed. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014.