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Hospital Evacuation Decision Guide

This Hospital Evacuation Decision Guide was developed by AHRQ, the lead Federal agency charged with supporting research designed to improve the quality of health care, reduce its cost, address patient safety and medical errors, and broaden access to essential services.

This guide is designed to provide hospital evacuation decision teams with organized and systematic guidance on how to consider the many factors that bear on the decision to order an evacuation, and to assist decision teams in identifying some of the special situations, often overlooked, that may exist in their facility or geographic area that could affect the decision to evacuate.

This guide is intended to supplement hospital emergency plans, which frequently lack specific guidance on how to make the critical decision to evacuate (including what factors to consider and for how long the decision may be safely deferred).