The disaster response performance of hospitals in Taiwan: evaluation and classification

Abstract

Hospitals need disaster response plannings and temporary shelters to rescue victims in disasters. In Taiwan, there are 82 emergency medical service (EMS) hospitals are requested to possess guildlines of preparedness and responses to mitigation the damage and recovery the pre-event status in a disaster. A measurement chart including three major factors-facility, manpower, and disaster plan and drill mode-was created to evaluate the performance of disaster management of these EMS hospitals. Based on the expert opinions, some hospitals were selected as a reference set prior to the accreditation. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to classify each of the remaining hospitals into qualified or unqualified classes. Then, each unqualified hospital was recommended to improve its practice of disaster preparedness and responses into the qualified level. We also find that, on average, private hospitals perform better than public hospitals and medical centers perform better than the regional hospitals. But, the differences are not statistically significant.