Enhancing Crisis Preparedness in Healthcare Facilities: A Risk-Based Assessment Tool for Preventing Targeted Violent Attacks.

INTRODUCTION

Terrorist and other deliberate attacks on outpatient healthcare facilities pose a serious threat to the health and safety of the population. Strengthening the resilience of outpatient healthcare facilities to violent incidents requires a comprehensive approach that includes physical security, technological measures, staff preparedness, and effective emergency management. According to World Health Organization estimates, between 8% and 38% of healthcare workers experience physical violence during their professional career, highlighting the substantial magnitude and seriousness of this problem across healthcare systems.

OBJECTIVE

The study focuses on establishing a hierarchy of key dimensions of crisis preparedness. A second objective is to propose a methodological procedure that healthcare facilities can use to determine their own hierarchy of preparedness aspects and that is sufficiently flexible to be applied across different types of facilities and healthcare systems.

METHODS

The research was conducted as a mixed-methods study combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The quantitative part used the Analytic Hierarchy Process with 30 experts from 30 different outpatient healthcare facilities. Expert inputs were obtained through pairwise comparisons provided by these thirty crisis preparedness specialists and healthcare professionals.

RESULTS

The research revealed key shortcomings in the crisis preparedness of the analysed outpatient healthcare facilities. Six main preparedness dimensions were identified, three of which were rated as having the highest priority in the expert assessment. Based on these, the authors proposed a tool for assessing the current level of crisis preparedness, which can be applied within the internal audit of similar types of facilities.

CONCLUSION

The proposed tool contributes to the protection of soft targets in the healthcare sector and supports systematic planning of security measures. The study also provides a methodological framework usable by junior professionals and healthcare policy makers.