Rodriguez-Llanes JM. et al. Handbook: data-collection protocols & Statistical analysis plan for emBRACE HSS component. emBRACE Working paper. Brussels: Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 2015.

Assessing resilience of health care and social services in the face of natural disasters is of critical importance to the improvement (and monitoring) of resilience across European communities. However, adequate tools to assess resiliency of any of these systems are lacking. Here we focussed on hospital disaster resilience assessment and demonstrate its state of the art, the complexity of the process to measure it and the need for adaptation of the single tool available to date. We compare this unique tool, whose development spanned over four years of work, with our recently developed emBRACE community resilience framework as an additional validation step (i.e. content validation). Our results indicate that, despite room for tool improvement and adaptation to European settings being needed, it is a sound and promising initiative, which with adequate collaboration from stakeholders might be an integral part of the ongoing strategy for ‘Making Cities Resilient’ initiative (UNISDR 2012). The careful development of this tool paved the way for the development of other tools to assess and measure other complex systems