Assessing the Resilience of an Acute-care Hospital In the context of Current Security Threats

Abstract

Acute-care hospitals are the most important elements of the critical infrastructure in the area of healthcare in the Czech Republic. The disruption or failure of the services they provide would have a significant impact on the lives and health of the population. In recent years, these hospitals have often been threatened by the effects of various disruptive events, e.g. cyber attacks, disruptions of electricity supply or physical attacks. For this reason, it is necessary that hospitals have an adequate level of resilience, which would allow them to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of the disruptive events. The effectiveness of hospital resilience depends on their ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and/or rapidly recover from disruptive events. Currently, however, there are no available data about the resilience of hospitals of this type. For this purpose, the article is aimed at assessing the resilience of selected acute-care in the context of current disruptive events. Resilience is assessed using the CIERA method in the context of the effects of selected security threats, i.e. cascading, cybernetic and physical.