Seismic Rapid Assessment of the Architectural Configuration of Governmental Hospital Buildings in West Bank

This study aims mainly to conduct a rapid assessment of the architectural design of some government hospitals, a complement to an earlier study carried out by Earthquake Engineering Unit, in the Urban Planning and Disaster Risk Reduction Center at An Najah National University, the study aims to determine the Seismic ability of government hospitals, and suggest solutions ,recommendations to increase their resistance against earthquake hazards, and seismic risk assessment To reduce physical and human losses. To achieve this goal; the theoretical and analytical framework was adopted, And then using descriptive and analytical approaches several meetings were conducted with relevant stakeholders, field visits and surveys were also done to assess the current conditions of government hospitals in West Bank and their seismic susceptibility. The study concluded that only one government hospital building has “medium” seismic viability, two hospital buildings scored “high”, and the rest scored “very high”, which meant that most of the hospital buildings are considered unsafe according to EMS-98 scale. The study gave a set of recommendations to improve the seismic behavior of the buildings of these hospitals, by reducing the seismic ability , and recommendations are divided into four categories: recommendations on the near-term as possible to make some rapid procedures, which help to improve the efficiency of the building, that proceedings relating to non-structural elements as a whole and to provide general safety requirements. Recommendations on the long-term, The hospitals need long term proceedings, which need time and money, mostly related to the conducting structural intervention and strengthen acts(Seismic Retrofitting) of the hospital buildings that suffer from high vulnerability , in addition to general recommendations regarding the the seismic design and locations of hospitals that will be built in the future.