title: Prioritization strategies for patient evacuations.
abstract: Evacuation from a health care facility is considered last resort, and in the event of a complete evacuation, a standard planning assumption is that all patients will be evacuated. A literature review of the suggested prioritization strategies for evacuation planning-as well as the transportation priorities used in actual facility evacuations-shows a lack of consensus about whether critical or non-critical care patients should be transferred first. In addition, it is implied that these policies are "greedy" in that one patient group is given priority, and patients from that group are chosen to be completely evacuated before any patients are evacuated from the other group. The purpose of this paper is to present a dynamic programming model for emergency patient evacuations and show that a greedy, "all-or-nothing" policy is not always optimal as well as discuss insights of the resulting optimal prioritization strategies for unit- or floor-level evacuations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Engineering, Clemson University, 110 Freeman Hall, Clemson, SC, 29634-0920, USA, childer@clemson.edu.
authors.forename: Ashley Kay
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Childers
authors.forename: Maria E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Mayorga
authors.forename: Kevin M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Taaffe
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004189:Disaster Planning / Q000458:organization & administration*; D015276:Health Care Rationing / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006739:Hospital Administration; D057766:Policy; D013597:Systems Analysis; D014187:Transportation of Patients / Q000458:organization & administration*