Probabilistic seismic assessment of health-care systems at regional scale

This paper presents a model to estimate the impact of an earthquake on the regional health-care system and to evaluate its capability to cope with the demand of medical care arising from a seismic event. The probabilistic methodology recently developed for the seismic assessment of a single hospital facility (Lupoi et al., 2008), whose performance is measured in terms of the number of functioning operating theatres and of beds available, is integrated in this work within a larger analysis framework for the seismic vulnerability assessment of interconnected infrastructural systems, designed to account for interdependencies between transportation, utility networks and the buildings hit by a seismic event, as well as for all relevant uncertainties, especially in terms of distributed seismic hazard and physical vulnerability of the systems. The proposed model is applied to a sample infrastructure, made up of a regional health-care system and a road network.