To reduce earthquake-induced casualties, it is essential to analyze the capability and demand of post-earthquake medical rescue in a city. This study proposes a joint method for such analysis. First, a casualty analysis solution using a population heat map was created to determine the demand for post-earthquake medical rescue. Subsequently, a route planning algorithm, considering the impact of collapsed buildings, was designed to quickly match the hospital with injured people and transport them to the hospital. Finally, a discrete event simulation (DES) model of hospitals was built to calculate temporal variations in medical rescue capability, based on the matched injured people and their travel time, and a real case of a hospital in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake was used to validate the DES model. Using the proposed method, the post-earthquake rescue demand of a small city in China and the rescue capability of a hospital in this city were analyzed. The results indicate that the hospital is unable to meet the rescue demand within 72 h after the earthquake. The outcome of this study can evaluate the capability and demand for post-earthquake medical rescue in a city, which helps reveal bottlenecks in the process of medical rescue and thus reduce casualties.
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Xu et al. (2022) studied this question.
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