Pathology of Health and Treatment Centers in Terms of Passive Defense: A Review Study

Background and Aim: Passive defense is a type of civilian defense system which its implementation, could be possible to prevent large financial losses to vital and sensitive military and civilian equipment and facilities, human casualties or to reduce the amount of these losses and casualties to the possibly minimum level. The purpose of this study is to identify the important factors regarding the location, architecture and pathology of health and treatment centers in crisis conditions and to reduce vulnerability to all kinds of hazards and to specify the important issues related to the passive defense approach.
Methods: In this research, Iranian and foreign articles indexed from PubMed, CIVILICA, Magiran, SID and Google Scholar databases were analyzed. Fifty review articles that included quantitative and qualitative research related to the last 17 years (from 2006 to now) in Persian and English languages. Finally, 39 articles were used.
Results: Passive defense is a set of non-armed actions that reduce vulnerability in crisis situations. One of the most important vulnerable centers in crisis conditions is health and treatment centers. One of the pillars of passive defense is minimizing the vulnerability of these centers and increasing their accessibility in crisis situations. In other way, the most important factor in investigating the passive defense approach in the construction and equipping of medical centers is their initial location, which is located in an area far from the population concentration, and in terms of structural, equipment, and cyber safety, it is necessary to be completely safe. On the other hand, ensuring the safety of food and drug warehouses in times of crisis and other times is one of the most important effective factors in reducing the vulnerability of healthcare centers. Increasing the level of awareness of managers and personnel of health-treatment centers regarding passive defense can be one of the most important factors in reducing the vulnerability of these centers.
Conclusion: One of the most important factors for the safety of healthcare centers with a passive defense approach is prevention of structural vulnerability and their proper positioning; which can suffer the least damage and provide the most services in crisis situations. Other important things are the training of managers and personnel before the crisis, as well as observing and promoting the principles of passive defense in the food and medicine warehouses of medical centers.