Factor Analysis to Evaluate Hospital Resilience

Abstract

Health care facilities should be able to quickly adapt to catastrophic events such as natural and human-made disasters. One way to reduce the impacts of extreme events is to enhance a hospital’s resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability to absorb and recover from hazardous events, containing the effects of disasters when they occur. The goal of this paper is to propose a fast methodology for quantifying disaster resilience of health care facilities. An evaluation of disaster resilience was conducted on empirical data from tertiary hospitals in the San Francisco Bay area. A survey was conducted during a 4-month period using an ad hoc questionnaire, and the collected data were analyzed using factor analysis. A combination of variables was used to describe the characteristics of the hidden factors. Three factors were identified as most representative of hospital disaster resilience: (1) cooperation and training management; (2) resources and equipment capability; and (3) structural and organizational operating procedures. Together they cover 83% of the total variance. The overall level of hospital disaster resilience (R) was calculated by linearly combining the three extracted factors. This methodology provides a relatively simple way to evaluate a hospital’s ability to manage extreme events.