Hospital evacuation in the event of a hurricane is a complex and unpredictable process. Recent natural disasters have called attention to the importance of a timely evacuation plan. The success of an evacuation greatly depends on developing and evaluating alternative plans. However, there is no standard approach to address the issues of a hospital evacuation. This research describes the development of a simulation model and initial analysis to assess the effectiveness of an evacuation plan given different scenarios and resources.

Late starting surgeries at a Greenville Memorial Hospital have been shown to cause process and scheduling disruptions, and are a major contributor to dissatisfaction among patients and hospital staff. The preoperative system requires the preparation of a high volume of patients, each with an individual set of characteristics and array of required tasks before surgery. Staff resources do not have a prescribed sequence of activities nor mutually exclusive duties. A novel discrete event modeling paradigm has been adopted for simulating the complex behavior of the preoperative system, identifying the underlying causes of process inefficiencies, and testing mitigating strategies. Current investigations are underway to shift the prescriptive approach of resource decision-making towards an agent-based approach, allowing resources to select their workload in such a way that achieves maximum utility for the agent.

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.