Using ‘people flow data’ to improve evacuation

‘Planning for fire evacuation in healthcare facilities’ was the theme of a presentation at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2017 conference by Dr Aoife Hunt, a managing consultant and hospital evacuation specialist at people movement consultancy, Movement Strategies, who, for the past 12 years, says she has been ‘breaking new ground in crowd dynamics and people movement analytics’. Here she describes how some of she and her team’s recent work – which has harnessed sophisticated ‘people flow’ data and analytics – has examined how fire evacuation procedures and protocols, and means of escape, in healthcare premises can be optimised, with the findings providing valuable pointers for future hospital design. 

There are around 1,800 fires in UK hospitals and nursing homes every single year. This sounds like an enormous number, but of course the majority are small fires that do not require evacuation. These fires typically represent about 1.1-5% of all UK fire incidents annually. 

Hospitals, of course, house people with mobility impairments and mobilityassociated equipment, and this poses a very particular challenge in terms of evacuation. Healthcare premises are also highly complex spaces, so you might have large wings that have been added over time, areas that are not as accessible as others, multi-level inpatient towers, or sprawling campuses. There may be locked doors to accommodate psychiatric patients, as well the use of oxygen through certain areas, which can be another fire challenge. Healthcare facilities are thus unique spaces within which to plan evacuations. There is also a high dependency on staff procedures for evacuation in healthcare premises. When you look into human behaviour in evacuations, people remain social creatures, often operating in the existing social hierarchy