Introduction

Prerequisite to the discussion of disaster planning and vulnerability assessment for health care delivery systems is a fundamental appreciation for the unique organizational nature of such systems:

"Health care systems are complex entities that are difficult to operate under normal circumstances. Catastrophes such as natural disasters or terrorist acts can have severe impacts on health care systems by overloading them with casualties. At the same time, these catastrophes can greatly reduce health care systems' capacity for dealing with this demand by damaging health care facilities or causing a loss of critical services such as electric power or telecommunications. The consequences of these major incidents are not straightforward and may be transmitted through health care systems in ways that cannot be anticipated" (Hirsch, 2004).

Accordingly, this lesson examines key challenges in disaster planning, a basic vulnerability assessment model, and the concept of infrastructure system interdependencies from a health care delivery systems perspective.

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Explain three key challenges for health care delivery systems with respect to disaster planning
• Define asset criticality and its role in enterprise-wide prioritization of assets
• Describe the three steps in a basic vulnerability assessment and use a template to perform one
• Describe four classes of infrastructure systems interdependencies and provide an example of each