Engineering the New Combat Support Hospital

In the following study we evaluate the optimal arrangement of deployable medical capability components (intensive care units (ICUs), intermediate care wards (ICWs), and operating room (OR) suites) given scenarios designed to represent stability operations through major combat operations. These capabilities are then compared to achievable medical capability based on certain engineering design characteristics (e.g., bed capacity) of the proposed modular combat support hospital (CSH). If all scenarios are equally weighted, then the optimal ratio of capability per 1000 admissions is about 15 OR suites to 42 ICUs to 165 ICWs or about 1:3:11. Applying service engineering assembly limitations, the optimal selection of capability assemblies over all 27 scenarios is estimated.