Providing Complete High-Level Overviews of Hospital Resilience Through Semi-Quantitative Stress Tests

Strengthening the resilience of hospital systems has gained significant attention following the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing global conflicts, which have highlighted their vulnerability to potentially disruptive events. This paper presents a novel approach to provide complete high-level overviews of hospital resilience through semi-quantitative stress tests. The paper describes the theoretical framework and a tool which facilitates its implementation. Additionally, the approach is demonstrated by using it to assess the resilience of a hospital in Lebanon. It is shown that the quantification of resilience through specific service measures enables clear identification of where changes to the hospital system can improve hospital resilience, as well as the possible magnitude of resilience improvement. The approach uses a relatively short list of indicators to help balance comprehensiveness and computational efficiency. An example of a potentially disruptive event, i.e., a stress test, is a mass casualty incident. The connection between the event and the service measures was developed semi-quantitatively using considerable information from scientific literature and expert opinion. Although the case study only consists of one stress test it demonstrates that this approach has considerable potential to provide a much-needed overview of the resilience of hospital systems and how the resilience can be best improved. Its use will provide valuable insights for both hospital managers and regulatory bodies in their discussions of how to best improve healthcare infrastructure.