Enhancing the resilience of acute care facilities: An overview of MCEER research

Due to the complexity of acute care facilities, and depending on the extent of seismic deficiencies in any specific hospital, considerable investment may be required to ensure that an acute care facility remains operational following an earthquake. The extensive resources that would be required to achieve such a level of resilience would likely not be available at the onset, and activities to upgrade the facilities would have to be staggered over many years. Ideally, using the limited resources available at any time along this multi-year upgrading process, the objective would be to first make the investments that provide the largest enhancements to seismic resilience, and to sequence all subsequent investments following the same logic. This approach presents a significant challenge to decision makers and their specialist consultants, as there is no integrated tool that could support such a decision on factual engineering data. Note that within the spectrum of possible decisions, building new facilities must also be considered. This paper summarizes the research conducted at the Multidisplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering (MCEER) aimed at providing such integration for enhancing the seismic resilience for acute care facilities.