Advancing Resilience of Critical Health Infrastructures to Cascading Impacts of Water Supply Outages—Insights from a Systematic Literature Review

Sänger, Nathalie, Heinzel, Christine and Sandholz, Simone, (2021). Advancing Resilience of Critical Health Infrastructures to Cascading Impacts of Water Supply Outages—Insights from a Systematic Literature Review. Infrastructures, 1-19

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  • Sub-type Journal article
    Author Sänger, Nathalie
    Heinzel, Christine
    Sandholz, Simone
    Title Advancing Resilience of Critical Health Infrastructures to Cascading Impacts of Water Supply Outages—Insights from a Systematic Literature Review
    Appearing in Infrastructures
    Publication Date 2021-12-14
    Place of Publication Basel
    Publisher MDPI
    Start page 1
    End page 19
    Language eng
    Abstract The current understanding of critical health infrastructure resilience is still dominated by a technical perspective. Reality however is different, as past events including the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed: emergency situations are only rarely exclusively technical in nature. Instead they are a product of prior circumstances, often linked to natural hazards, technical mishaps, and insufficient social and organizational preparedness structures. However, experiences and lessons learned from past events are still largely overlooked and have not sufficiently found their way into conceptual understandings of critical health infrastructure resilience. This paper addresses this gap by challenging the one-sided and technically oriented understanding of resilience in the context of critical health infrastructure. Based on a systematic literature review, it assesses real-world cases of water supply failures in healthcare facilities, a serious threat largely overlooked in research and policy. The results underscore the need for targeted organizational strategies to deal with cascading impacts. The overall findings show that addressing technical aspects alone is not sufficient to increase the overall resilience of healthcare facilities. Broadening the dominant resilience understanding is hence an important foundation for healthcare infrastructures to improve risk management and emergency preparedness strategies to increase their resilience towards future disruptions.
    UNBIS Thesaurus RISK MANAGEMENT
    Keyword Resilience
    Critical health infrastructures
    Water supply failures
    Emergency preparedness
    Healthcare facilities
    Social-technical systems
    Copyright Holder The Authors
    Copyright Year 2021
    Copyright type Creative commons
    DOI 10.3390/infrastructures6120177
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    Created: Fri, 17 Dec 2021, 19:01:10 JST by Aarti Basnyat on behalf of UNU EHS