Welcome!
We are a group of researchers from the Human/Buildings Simulation, Integration, Visualization, and Automation Lab (SIVA Lab) at the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction, the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, interested in understanding Hospital Operations during surge events (generally and during the COVID-19 pandemic). Currently, we have a project aimed at gathering data from interviews with hospital administrators who were involved in making policy and protocol changes during surge events over the last three years (since Jan 2020). The project is titled "An assessment of the hospital’s pandemic response decisions and the impact of their facilities on these decisions." We are interested to use this data to help answer a few questions about hospital design and operations planning, such as: “How can hospitals be better prepared (in how they are designed and how they are run) for future next surge events?”.
Goals
The goal of this work is to understand how hospital pandemic response decisions impacted operations, how layout changes influenced or impacted operations, and how data from this work can be used in novel operational models. We aim to conduct this research by assessing these response decisions through semi-structured interviews and analyzing them with content analysis to understand the impact and lessons learned. The aggregate themes and data collected from these interviews will be used to improve current data-driven models to give recommendations for future incident commanders, hospital administrators, and researchers.