Reshaping Healthcare Disaster Resilience Through Innovative Use of Intelligent Environment

摘要

Introduction Research findings, experience and statistics suggest that natural hazards are becoming more devastating because of their increasing frequency, intensities and growing vulnerabilities associated with defenseless infrastructure, ageing society and inadequately prepared emergency services. Risk is often considered as a complex and intertwined relation between hazards; their location; social, technical and physical vulnerabilities; and the size of the exposed population. This indicates that disaster resilience is a highly complex concept that gets even more complicated when it deals with healthcare. The delivery of adequate healthcare post disasters depends on the state of infrastructure, staffing and supplies any elementary impact on any of these will result in reduced healthcare service and in some cases total failure of this critical service. Lack of evidence on the status of each of these individually and combined have caused time waste and in some cases interruption of the service. Technology and specifically intelligent environment tools (e.g. virtual reality) have been used in some areas such as spreading awareness; however, this implementation remains limited and thus requires further debates and with experts from a wide range of disciplines such as intelligent environment experts, disaster mitigation experts, emergency responders and others. This lecture presents the challenges associated with healthcare resilience in order to open a discussion with experts about ways to explore how Intelligent Environments can help to address the challenges in these areas.