Although the organization of KRWs is in flux as the system of hospitals grows, results over the past 8 years suggest that changes in national insurance policies are affecting the quantity and organization of rehabilitation interventions and improvement in patient outcomes.

A series of full-scale shaking table tests are conducted using the E-Defense shaking table facility on a base-isolated four-story RC hospital structure. A variety of furniture items, medical appliances, and service utilities are placed on the hospital specimen in as realistic a manner as possible. Four ground motions are adopted, including recorded near-fault ground motions and synthesized long-period, long-duration ground motions. The test results show that the base-isolated system performed very effectively against near-fault ground motions due to significant reduction in the floor acceleration response, and operability and functionality of the hospital service is improved significantly as compared with the case observed for the corresponding base-fixed system. Against the long-period ground motion, however, the hospital service is difficult to maintain, primarily because of the significant motion of furniture items and medical appliances supported by casters. Resonance accentuated large displacements and velocities on the floors of the base-isolated system, which causes such furniture items and medical appliances to slide, sometimes more than 3 m, resulting in occasional collision with other furnitures or against the surrounding partition walls. It is notable that a key to maintaining the function of the medical facilities is to securely lock the casters of furniture and medical appliances. E. SATO ET AL. more emphasis on 'experiences' than do other engineering disciplines. As urbanization progresses rapidly, the society becomes denser and as many components that form the society interact with increasing complexity, the resilience of society is naturally lessened. In such an era, the attitude of 'learning from actual earthquake damages' is most likely not acceptable any longer. One alternative is to adjust our attitude to one of 'learning from quasi-actual earthquake damages.' One tool for experiencing such damages is the large shaking table, dubbed E-Defense, developed in Japan after the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake [1,2]. Since its inauguration in 2005, E-Defense has conducted nearly 40 full-scale or large-scale shaking table tests, applied to RC building frames, RC bridge peers, steel building frames, wooden houses and apartments, soil liquefaction, energy facilities, among others, for example [3][4][5][6][7][8]. The tests supply detailed data on the actual behavior and collapse of the tested structures, offering the earthquake engineering community opportunities to assess the actual seismic performance of the structures.Life safety has been of utmost importance in earthquake engineering, but maintaining the quality of life has also become a critical issue in the recent years. Nonstructural damage, business continuity, quick damage assessment, and other issues have been seriously explored, particularly in the context of performance-based seismic design. To achieve enhanced functionality and operability, base isolation has become very popular in Japan. The first base-isolated building structure was ...

This study describes the effect of all single-room wards on hospital-bed management and how it differs from mixed multi-bedroom wards from a case of redesigned hospital building. Surveys were conducted for 32 days by nurses in these two types of wards with a recordkeeping of each patient's bed location, patient's nursing need degrees, and the reasons of each patient-bed transfer. It showed that both types of wards have a tendency to place patients who need high level of nursing care, around the staff station. The study concludes that the all single-room wards reduce the number of patient-bed transfers especially based on patient's request for favorable therapeutic environment.

were signifi cantly lower in the ≥6 units group than in the other 2 groups. The number of days spent in the rehabilitation facility was signifi cantly lower, by approximately 12 days, in the ≥6 units group than in the other groups. Conclusion: These results revealed that facilities providing ≥6 units/day of rehabilitation even on holidays enabled patients to be discharged from the facility in signifi cantly fewer days, despite accepting patients with more severe stroke, compared to facilities providing fewer units of rehabilitation.

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