World: Hospital Safety Index Guide for Small and Medium Healthcare Facilities

Country: World Source: Pan American Health Organization Please refer to the attached file. Preface The impact of torrential rain, earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides, and other hazards reveals the complexity of natural hazard vulnerability in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Many of the effects of natural hazards are seen in severe damage to health infrastructure. When hospitals that are built to provide health services are damaged or are unable to function, the ill and injured have no place to go for assistance. This has an enormous impact on populations that depend on these services on a regular basis. Given this reality, the countries of the Americas agreed to adopt “Hospitals Safe from Disasters” as a national policy for risk reduction, 1 in order to ensure that all new hospitals are built with a level of safety that will ensure that they will continue to function during, and immediately after, severe natural-hazard events. This initiative also calls for the use of risk mitigation measures to retrofit existing hospitals, particularly those providing primary health care. A “safe hospital” can be defined as a health care hospital whose services remain accessible and function at maximum capacity and in the same infrastructure, during and immediately following the impact of a major event. This implies structural stability, ongoing availability of basic services, and organization within the hospital. The Pan American Health Organization, with the support of a group of experts from different countries, developed the Hospital Safety Index, 2 a tool for making a quick and reliable assessment of hospitals. It provides a snapshot of the safety level of a hospital, which is an essential hospital for a community, and as such must continue to function following an adverse event. Because hospitals that belong to a health network have different functions, levels of safety to be achieved can be addressed differently and progressively. This manual complements the Hospital Safety Index and aims to improve the safety and response capacity of smaller hospitals in adverse events. In this guide, medium and small hospitals are defined as those of low complexity, which along with the major hospitals, make up the health networks.

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