Allocation of resources for hospital evacuations via simulation

Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) issued an order recently requiring that all hospitals have an evacuation plan with the following components: sheltering plan, transportation plan and staffing plan. Also, these hospitals carry out tests to become familiar with the sequence of events that need to occur for an effective evacuation. However, risk managers only have a limited number of scenarios that they can actually consider for testing, due to time constraints or complexity in performing the tests. They can not make sure of the efficiency and effectiveness of their plans. Inefficient and ineffective evacuation plan may result in tragic loss of life as occurred in evacuation of hospitals as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This research proposes a simulation model that can be used by the hospitals to evaluate their performances in case of an evacuation due to a hurricane.