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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
This talk will focus on evaluating how well prepared Southern California hospitals are for pandemic influenza. We apply the lessons learned from this specific scenario to develop nationally applicable results. I will evaluate the effectiveness of several intervention strategies and behavioral changes in decreasing the cumulative number of bed shortages. Our results show that behavioral changes can reduce the potential shortfall of hospitals during pandemic influenza and that aggregation to the metropolitan level underestimates the severity of bed shortages at individual hospitals. In order to assess the preparedness of 220 hospitals in six Southern California counties with a population of over 18 million individuals, we used the output of an agent based simulation model, EpiSims. We examined different hospitalization rates and varying hospitalization durations throughout our computations. Our observations led to the development of a simple model of hospital stay duration that captures the behavior of more complex models. The capacity of health-care systems to handle patient visits during normal seasonal influenza outbreaks has been diminishing. Pandemic influenza likely will have much higher morbidity and attack rates than seasonal flu. Preparing ahead of time for an influenza pandemic is essential for public health officials and hospital administrators
Host: Markus Berndt T-7