On 21–23 October 2024, WHO/Europe, together with the WHO Country Office in Georgia, will convene a national training-of-trainers to strengthen Georgia’s capacity to assess hospital safety and resilience against emergencies, with a special emphasis on flood hazards. The event is being organized in conjunction with the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Health, Labour and Social Affairs of Georgia.
Participants will include chief doctors and nurses from the major hospitals in the country, specialists in hospital critical systems such as biomedical engineers, and other health emergency professionals. They will engage in training sessions covering the application of the Hospital Safety Index (HSI) tool, which is used to assess hospitals’ safety and vulnerabilities, make recommendations on necessary actions, and promote low-cost/high-impact measures for improving safety and strengthening emergency preparedness. It is designed to collect information about structural safety, non-structural safety, and the disaster management capacities of a hospital.
The training will include a practical component, which will give participants the opportunity to practice using the tool in a real hospital environment.
In addition to familiarizing the participants with the HSI and ensuring that they can carry out hospital safety assessments, the training is designed to build the capacity of participants to cascade the knowledge learned and implement the training in their own communities. Immediately after the training, participants will train their own teams and assess hospitals across the country using this tool. A report will be generated summarizing the findings.
This training builds on the Country Office’s initial training on hospital safety in 2017–2018 and is in line with the initiative to strengthen hospital safety and emergency preparedness across the country, ultimately improving the availability of and access to health care during times of disaster. It comes as part of WHO/Europe’s priority to strengthen hospital safety across the European Region and a series of activities to improve the preparedness of health facilities for emergencies.