International Meeting
Hospitals in Disasters: Handle with Care
San Salvador, El Salvador 8-10 July 2003
Purpose -- Agenda
-- Guidelines -- Sponsors
List of Participants
Hospitals in Disasters: Handle with Care
Recent major disasters in the Americas—including Hurricane Mitch, the landslide in Venezuela, the earthquakes in El Salvador, Hurricane Isidore, the Peruvian earthquake and others—have yielded valuable lessons regarding damage to health facilities and solutions to lessen the impact on critical infrastructure. This experience, coupled with the conclusions of the regional meeting on hospital disaster mitigation held in 1996, points to the need to examine more closely three main topic areas: disaster mitigation, hospital evacuation and the use of foreign field hospitals.
Approximately 50% of the 15,000 hospitals in Latin America and the Caribbean are located in high-risk areas. In the last 20 years, more than 100 hospitals and at least 1,000 health care centers in this region were damaged as a consequence of natural disasters. The direct cost of these disasters has been enormous, not only were health services lost (including the interruption of urgently needed health services), but in some cases the collapse of hospitals caused the death of occupants.
In this context, existing regulations concerning the design and construction of health facilities must be revised and enforced, reorienting them toward disaster mitigation, with the ultimate goal of protecting the lives of patients, staff and other occupants and ensuring that these facilities can continue to function during and after a disaster strikes. The knowledge on how to build safe hospitals exists and is accessible. A guide for investors and health managers addressing this issue will be discussed.
At some point during an emergency or disaster, it may be necessary to evacuate hospitals. But unnecessary evacuation can lead to serious problems, including the reintegration of a health facility into the health services network, which could take several months. The topic of when to evacuate a hospital will be discussed.
When hospitals are evacuated, one way to provide immediate medical care to victims of natural disasters seems to be the mobile field hospitals that many Western countries maintain for their defense forces. Some political authorities in disaster-affected countries have accepted the donation of self-contained field hospitals as a temporary substitute for health facilities damaged by disasters. However, often these foreign hospitals have not met the expectations, generating frustration and disappointment for all parties concerned: recipients and donor countries, the medical staff and the patients. On several occasions, field hospitals contributed to deterioration of health conditions among the affected population and delayed a return to pre-disaster levels. A working document will be discussed.
The World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Department for International Development of the U.K. (DFID), the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), The German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and other international organizations agree to support the organization of a workshop to examine these issues more closely. The Pan American health Organization will host the international meeting entitled “Hospitals in Disasters: Handle with Care” in El Salvador, Central America, from 8-10 July 2003.
The objectives of the meeting are to review and validate, prior to dissemination: a) a manual on hospital design mitigation; b) recommendations on hospital evacuation in disaster situations; and c) the guidelines on field hospitals. This meeting is technical in nature and participants will include a limited number of high-level experts with broad experience and responsibility for disaster mitigation, management and rehabilitation of hospitals from ministries of health, social security institutions, international agencies, financing agencies, universities, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, among others.
Participant’s Profile
Hospital Mitigation: Professionals in the areas of health, engineering, architecture, hospital management or finance, with extensive theoretical knowledge and/or practical experience in hospital planning, design, financing, construction, vulnerability analysis, maintenance and/or repair in areas affected by disasters.
Hospital evacuation: Health and relief agency workers with theoretical knowledge and practical experience in hospital evacuation in cases of an internal hospital emergency or disaster.
Field hospitals: Health professionals, the armed forces, cooperation
agencies and/or humanitarian assistance, relief agencies, among others, with
practical experience in requesting, mobilizing, installing, operating and
dismantling of field hospitals in cases of disaster.
Agenda
Tuesday, 8 July
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Working group A: Hospital Mitigation |
Working group B: Hospital Evacuation |
Working group C: Field Hospitals |
Wednesday, 9 July
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Working group A: Hospital Mitigation |
Working group B: Hospital Evacuation |
Working group C: Field Hospitals |
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Thursday, 10 July
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Working group A: Hospital Mitigation |
Working group B: Hospital Evacuation |
Working group C: Field Hospitals |
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Guidelines for Working Groups
The guidelines for the working groups will downoad in MS Word format (these documents are draft versions).
- Guidelines for vulnerability reduction in the design of new health facilities
- Use of Foreign Field Hospitals in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters
- Proposed Guidelines for the use of
Foreign Field Hospitals
Sponsors
 PAN AMERICAN HEALTH ORGANIZATION |
 WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION |
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 Ministry of Public Health and Social Services of El Salvador |
For more information on this meeting please write to: disaster@paho.org.