The hospital attacked[L’hôpital attaqué]

The hospital, through its health missions to populations, presents all the characteristics of vulnerable targets: an essential role for the nation, but an extreme accessibility for all types of aggressions and threats, endogenous, exogenous, natural, technological, and of course terrorists. The hospital and emergency services are far from being spared from terrorist attacks, involving various types of weapons, most often conventional, sometimes with secondary attacks or the use of ambulances as booby-trapped vectors. Direct attacks on the hospital using Nuclear, Radiological agents (NR) and Chemical (C) agents are much rarer, and the hospital is generally only the secondary victim, fortuitous or premeditated, of an accidental or terrorist extra-hospital chemical event. The most significant threat to date is in practice represented by cyber-attacks, which not only cause massive and lasting disorganization of the hospital system, but can be the cause of immediate morbidity and mortality through the paralysis of monitoring or life support systems for critical care patients. The response to these different types of exceptional health situations now involves the ORSAN system, an integrated framework for preparing and ramping up health system establishments and professionals.