Factors influencing hospital resilience
Citation: Khademi Jolgehnejad A, Ahmadi Kahnali R, Heyrani A. Factors Influencing Hospital Resilience. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. 2021;15(5):661-8.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: No.
Funding sources: Nothing noted.
What is this? Evidence on how to ensure that hospitals are resilient to disasters and other emergencies may help with the development of hospital preparedness plans and with health emergency and disaster risk management (health EDRM).
In this systematic review, the authors searched for studies of factors influencing hospital resilience and analysing how these factors might affect resilience. They restricted their searches to articles published in English between 2000 and 2018. They included 16 studies, which were from Australia (1), Cambodia (1), Canada (1), China (2), India (1), Iran (1), Israel (1), Japan (1), Lao (1), Malaysia (1), the Philippines (2), Sweden (1), Taiwan (1), USA (2) and Vietnam (1).
What was found: The included studies covered three resilience process phases: preparedness, response, and recovery and growth and found that, although preparedness is the most important phase, the response and recovery phase must also be properly considered.
22 factors influencing hospital resilience were identified, which were classified in a framework that links the three stages of resilience with the key components of a hospital: staff, infrastructure, management and logistics.
Implications: The authors of the review concluded that their conceptual framework for understanding hospital resilience might help those developing plans for hospital preparedness. They stated that future research could focus on the social determinants of hospital resilience and the hospital supply chain.
Other considerations: The authors of the review did not discuss their findings in the context of issues relating to health equity.
This summary was prepared by Catherine Haynes, checked by Cristián Mansilla, and finalized by Mike Clarke.