Emergency Management in Hospitals supported in Geographic Information Systems - A Short Review

The development of an emergency management program has as basic principles the analysis of risk / hazard and the identification of operations required to reduce exposure to them. It is intended to present a short literature review, identifying the importance of the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in management of emergency in a global context in which the same guidelines may be applied in hospitals. We ran a bibliographical research on electronic databases via the Metalib search engine of Exlibris, defining keywords, and the search was carried out in a systematic manner. We used the following keywords: emergency management, GIS and hospital. 907 articles were obtained and 37 selected. Based on the selected literature, we can conclude that there is an agreement amongst authors regarding: i) the importance of emergency planning in hospitals, which should include a systematic approach using administrative and organizational decisions, and operational capacity in the implementation of policies and strategies to decrease the impact of risks; ii) the benefits of the use of GIS in hospitals to map and model potential disasters, assisting in the visualization of vulnerabilities and damage assessment. The GIS are a valuable tool to aid in emergency management in a hospital environment.