A system dynamics model was developed to help hospitals assess their ability to handle surges of demand during various types of disasters. The model represents all major flows of patients through a hospital and indicates how specific responses to a surge may ameliorate bottlenecks and their potentially harmful effects on patients. The model was calibrated to represent a specific hospital in West Virginia and was tested under three quite different surge scenarios: a bus crash, a chemical plant leak, and a SARS outbreak. Under the difficult conditions of the SARS scenario, avoidable deaths of patients awaiting emergency care could be effectively reduced by adding reserve nursing staff not in the emergency department, as might be expected, but in the overloaded inpatient wards. The model can help hospital planners better anticipate how patient flows may be affected by disasters, and identify best practices for maximizing the hospital’s surge capacity under such conditions.

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Date created

• 2005 July 17-2005 July 21

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

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cc5bb0ac12a5b68b26b1583548898dae

Scope and Contents

Part of

3c582e6f5cf305ef0030c7471b499022

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives