Public Health Emergency Preparedness
This resource was part of AHRQ's Public Health Emergency Preparedness program, which was discontinued on June 30, 2011, in a realignment of Federal efforts.
This information is for reference purposes only. It was current when produced and may now be outdated. Archive material is no longer maintained, and some links may not work. Persons with disabilities having difficulty accessing this information should contact us at: https://info.ahrq.gov. Let us know the nature of the problem, the Web address of what you want, and your contact information.
Please go to www.ahrq.gov for current information.
A public health emergency can strain the capacity of hospitals and other traditional venues for medical services. In such emergencies, it may be necessary to select alternate facilities for providing medical care. Two new interactive computer tools, Disaster Alternate Care Facility Selection Tool and an ancillary tool, Alternate Care Facility Patient Selection Tool, will help institutions and communities select alternate care facilities and determine which patients to send to them.
Select to Download Information.
The Disaster Alternate Care Facility Selection Tool helps the user compare the features of actual sites with the features that are necessary for a given emergency. An ancillary tool, the Alternate Care Facility Patient Selection Tool, helps the user determine whether the health status of a given patient allows for transfer to an alternate site.
The Disaster Alternate Care Facility Selection tool helps institutions and communities select a temporary alternate care facility or facilities during a public health emergency over a small geographic area. The user rates the necessity of various features for a given facility in a give incident type and then enters the actual features for each facility under consideration. The tool automatically produces a comparison of the suitability of different potential facilities for a specific incident type. Up to six facilities can be compared.
The tools were developed under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and funded by HHS's Health Resources and Services Administration.
Download Information
Disaster Alternate Care Facility Selection Tool
Alternate Care Facility Patient Selection Tool
The Disaster Alternate Care Facility Selection Tool and Alternate
Care Facility Patient Selection Tool will be available in both Web
and Excel® versions. You may download the zipped Excel version of
these tools from this page by using the links below. To
save the files onto your computer, you may right click on the link and then
select "Save
Target As" (Internet
Explorer) or "Save
Link As" (Firefox® or Netscape®).
To unzip the two compressed files after downloading to your computer, use
Windows® Explorer
to locate and open the file. If your computer does not have file compression
software installed, you may wish to download free
WinZip file compression software. 
Tool Set Requirements
For these Excel worksheets to properly function, you must "Enable Macros" upon opening each file. The macro security level setting for Excel should be set no higher than "Medium," and you should use virus protection software. If you were not given a window allowing you to select "Enable Macros" upon opening this file, you may notice that many of the calculations will not work. With the file open in Excel, go to the "Tools" menu, select "Macro," select "Security," and then choose "Medium" from the "Security Level" tab. Contact your internal computer support department for help if needed.
Current as of September 2009
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