An evaluation model of surgery capability of tertiary hospital in disasters: a cross-sectional survey in China

•The capacity of national health care system responding to disasters is important but neglected in the public health field previously. Therefore, it is necessary to arouse the awareness of the public and government to evaluate and improve disaster response capacity.•Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive evaluation method discussed or established in any local studies on tertiary hospital capacity evaluation. Aimed to establish the comprehensive evaluation model among tertiary hospitals in PR China, we tried to evaluate the hospital surge capability in different provinces through the comprehensive evaluation model.•Our study results showed that a nationwide utility model was created for evaluating and measuring the surge capability of Chinese tertiary hospital capacity in disasters. And four principal components were identified to reflect the overall level of disaster surge capability as followed: hospital capacity and critical care resilience, hospital crisis management, hospital capacity, and surgery ability.