Healthcare
Beyond Resource Expansion: Building Resilient Hospital Surge Capacity for Sustained Crisis Response
By Li X, Xu J, Wang X and 1 others.
Abstract
Background
Hospital surge-capacity assessment has traditionally emphasized the expansion of beds, staff, equipment, and medical supplies, but provides limited insight into how these resources are transformed into sustained operational capabilities under uncertainty. This study develops a resilience-oriented function-capability framework to assess hospital surge capacity from a systems perspective.
Methods
Hospital surge capacity theory and hospital resilience theory were integrated to define 5 capability dimensions: functional reconfiguration, resource configuration, operational continuity, regional coordination, and collaborative optimization. FRAM was used to model 24 operational functions and their couplings under 4 synthesized surge scenarios. An improved K-shell algorithm quantified structural importance, while Monte Carlo derived functional-performance uncertainty was represented by truncated-normal prior distributions. Bayesian network was then used for performance assessment, propagation, sensitivity, and robustness analyses.