Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Malakeh Azizpour ¹
• Ali Zanghiabadi ²
• Zahra Ismaeilian ³

¹ Department of Geography and Planning,Tabriz University

² Isfahan University

³ Geography and Planning, Tabriz University

Abstract

One of the issues involved the more world large cities is the issue of natural disasters. Regarding the nature of being unexpected most of the natural occurrences and the necessity of a quick and accurate decisions-making, operation and theoretical and basic concepts have generated a knowledge called “crisis management”. To identify the urban crisis management and vulnerability of the centers related to the crisis of a city against natural disasters, its need to study the main factors effective in urban crisis management vulnerability. One of the effective factors in urban crisis management vulnerability is the structural and non-structural construction of organization related to the crisis management including the hospitals of the city. Health care and remedial centers especially the hospitals are such as the important places encountered with serious hazards and damages with a high rate of injuries and losses during the occurrence of natural events and accidents. Therefore, studying this issue in these centers seems to be very important.
The aim of this article is to rank the hospitals of Esfahan’s urban zones from the view of structural and non-structural construction and to achieve the structural and non-structural priorities of the city hospitals in order of their importance in increasing the vulnerability regarding to the studying indices. The survey method is “descriptive-analytic” in which the quantitative models have been applied. For a hierarchy analysis about the crisis management of Isfahan's hospitals, 41 variables at 9 basic factors in 25 hospitals were studied using the analytical hierarchy process (A. H. P). The results obtained from A.H.P. show different indices in which the factors of framework; type, building age and the number of beds with the importance rate of 11.959, 21.12 and 22.65 are in the first orders, respectively.
In fact, these factors cause the increase of vulnerability in the hospitals of the city if no enough attention is paid to when constructing and equipping. Moreover, the hospital of zones 1 and 3 hare the highest rates of vulnerability among the hospital of the city. Hence, the presence of difference in the rate of hospitals vulnerability at different zones of Esfahan is validated from the viewpoint of the structural and non-structural construction (the survey hypothesis).

Keywords

• Analytical hierarchy process (A.H.P)
• Natural disasters
• Vulnerability
• Urban crisis management
• Esfahan hospitals