The events at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital in 2008 offered a vivid reminder of the life safety implications of a serious hospital fire.
Patients undergoing surgery had to be taken off their anaesthetics and ventilators, and over 900 staff and patients evacuated.
While in a typical building, when the alarm goes off everyone leaves, in a hospital many occupants are simply unable to do so due to restricted mobility. Although most hospitals will only call the fire brigade after confirmation that there is a fire, all must respond as soon as an alarm activates. To avoid unnecessary disruption, fast, accurate, and reliable fire detection has a vital role.
Unwanted alarms are a massive problem in hospitals. According to Hochiki Europe, last year it was reported that one in five false fire alarms in Bolton, which firefighters had to attend, occurred at the Royal Bolton Hospital. Firefighters were called out to more than 100 alarms, at £2,000 per call-out. In London, the problem is on an even larger scale, with the capital’s hospitals generating 4,590 false alarm call-outs in 2009-10.
Hochiki Europe says it has taken its mission to eliminate unwanted alarms ‘to a whole new level’ by redesigning the chamber structure within its photoelectric smoke detector range. The new chamber design minimises the differences in sensitivity experienced in flaming and smouldering fires, thus providing a high performance optical chamber that is reportedly equally responsive to all smoke types, while reducing unwanted alarms.
Key to designing an effective fire detection system in a healthcare environment is the recognition that it must form part of the overall fire safety solution. A correctly specified, installed, and maintained emergency lighting system is another crucial component in keeping the occupants of a building safe from the potentially deadly consequences of a failure in the general lighting.
Hochiki Europe’s FIREscape emergency lighting solution is an EN50172-compliant, ‘intelligent’, low voltage system that utilises energy-saving LED technology. It comprises an addressable emergency lighting control panel with battery back-up, and features addressable, self-contained LED luminaires and signage connected via low voltage (40V) cabling. The company recently undertook a comparison of FIREscape with a traditional manual test system, and identified all the costs associated with each on a 1,000 luminaire system used over a 10-year period. It found that, over this period, using FIREscape could save £186, 534, with a CO2e reduction of over 29.5 tonnes.
Hochiki says the growing move towards integration of fire detection and emergency lighting systems has considerable benefits. For example, ‘intelligent ‘signage can be used to advise people which routes should and should not be used, while intelligent emergency luminaires can be used as an effective guidance system.
Hochiki said: “The evacuation of a hospital or other healthcare building is a logistical exercise that requires a well-defined strategy and, should a fire occur, swift action and coordination. In such an environment a correctly specified, installed, and maintained, life safety system will ensure the safety of staff, visitors and patients.”
