Seismic risk and functional adaptivity assessment of a hospital building by rapid visual screening: a pilot study.

Recent seismic events in Italy and COVID19 pandemic have underscored the importance of seismic safety and flexibility in public buildings, especially hospitals. These facilities should play a strategic role during disasters, as they are tasked with providing essential emergency aid to the population and ensuring the continuity of initial on-site healthcare interventions. Conversely, hospitals have often been found to be highly vulnerable to seismic actions and not adequately flexible in emergencies. This study aims to develop a novel methodology to assess the resilience of Italian healthcare facilities by accounting for seismic performance and functional flexibility, with a focus on nonstructural elements and organizational aspects. The study implements a rapid visual screening (RVS) assessment based on the extension of existing methods, applied to a pilot hospital. The methodology is based on an RVS-based estimation of seismic risk and flexibility indices, utilizing visual inspections, data collection, checklist completions, and question answering, and deriving quantitative estimations from elementary parameters to complex metrics. In particular, the seismic risk index can be assessed as it is traditionally done, considering seismic hazard, vulnerability, and exposure, estimated by simplified methods defined in the literature. The definition of the flexibility assessment method is novel, and it is based on the combination of elementary flexibility indices, associated with nonstructural elements, and functionality and operational indices, depending on the hospital facility features. The preliminary methodology is applied with regard to the Sant’Anna e San Sebastiano hospital of Caserta (Italy), which is a national relevance hospital facility (AORN). The study finally provides the first tentative seismic risk and flexibility indices associated with the pilot hospital, but the methodology should be calibrated by more refined studies in the future.