Resilience-based performance assessment of strain situations in emergency departments

In response to events and exceptional situations (e.g. health threats related to epidemics, seasonal flux, heat waves, and cold waves), hospital establishments in particular emergency departments, must be able to receive patients for medical and surgical treatments whatever the extent of the patient flow. The conventional medical resources are often outdated and ineffective in absorbing a large influx of patients, which often leads to strain situations. Hence it has become essential to strengthen the organization of hospital emergency departments so they can manage such situations. To cope with such situations, emergency departments must incorporate in their operating mode the capacity to anticipate, to react and to mobilize the necessary resources in order to have a sufficient level of resilience to meet their missions. In this paper we define and characterize the resilience of an emergency department, and propose a generic procedure to evaluate the resilience of the emergency departments.