Building Resilience in Health Infrastructure
Project Description
Provision of health services is central to ICRC’s humanitarian mandate and includes repair and rehabilitation of damaged health facilities and construction of new facilities ranging from small specialty clinics to large multi-function hospitals. In this project, we aim to go beyond a conventional risk analysis, which focuses on quantifying the frequency and minimising impacts of disruptive events. We want to build a resilience strategy for health infrastructure in unstable conflict-affected settings, which will focus both on avoiding performance losses and boosting the bounce back or recovery period. Resilient systems exhibit both social and technical resilience over time. We propose to operationalize the resilience of the Rafik Hariri University Hospital (RHUH), Beirut by integrating its multi-level system components: building services, building structures, and their socio-technical and organizational system.
It has been suggested that indicators measuring the diversity and connectivity of systems and their related sub-systems allows for measuring adaptive capacity and stability of the related system. This is what we want to grasp in a first rapid resilience assessment. The second stage will be the modelling of the system response to disruptive events. Agent based modelling will be a favoured approach. For the third stage, a resilience monitoring framework will be developed to provide a method to regularly and efficiently monitor gains and losses of health facility resilience considering specific requirements, capabilities and constraints pertaining to such facilities in protracted unstable settings.
Finally, based on the RHUH case study, a framework and decision support tool will be co-designed and developed to embrace a broader range of health facilities managed by ICRC and other humanitarian actors. In the medium term, this accessible framework can facilitate communication among various stakeholders involved in health facilities, including donor and implementing organisations, government authorities and local communities, enabling them to unpack the complex systemic interactions affecting health facility resilience.