Evacuation Data from a Hospital Outpatient Drill The Case Study of North Shore Hospital

Anass Rahouti,Sélim Datoussaïd,Phil Jackson,Ruggiero Lovreglio

doi:10.17815/cd.2020.44

Abstract

Assessing the fire safety of buildings is fundamental to reduce the impact of this threat on their occupants. Such an assessment can be done by combining existing models and existing knowledge on how occupants behave during fires. Although many studies have been carried out for several types of built environment, only few of those investigate healthcare facilities and hospitals. In this study, we present a new behavioural data-set for hospital evacuations. The data was collected from the North Shore Hospital in Auckland (NZ) during an unannounced drill carried out in May 2017. This drill was recorded using CCTV and those videos are analysed to generate new evacuation model inputs for hospital scenarios. We collected pre-movement times, exit choices and total evacuation times for each evacuee. Moreover, we estimated pre-movement time distributions for both staff members and patients. Finally, we qualitatively investigated the evacuee actions of patients and staff members to study their interaction during the drill. The results show that participants were often independent from staff actions with a majority able to make their own decision.

Highlights

Many egress models have been developed in the recent decades and they are used worldwide to assess the fire safety of buildings
It was found that the patients observed and studied the staff members actions and made decisions based on their perception
In total 30 pre-evacuation times were measured from the drill: 14 staff members and 16 patients

Summary

Introduction

Many egress models have been developed in the recent decades and they are used worldwide to assess the fire safety of buildings. Egress model users need to specify input values such as pre-evacuation times, evacuee speeds and evacuee actions, to define an evacuation scenario depending on the occupancy of the building. This is done by selecting those values from existing databases, when available, (see for instance [1,2,3]) or by making reasonable assumptions. Folk et al [14] conducted an announced fire drill at a retirement home in Canada They attempted to develop a baseline for the behaviour and actions of elderly people during pre-movement and travel phases of the engineering evacuation timeline model [1]. Even the residents who were fully ambulant did not evacuate until a staff member went to their room, prompted them to leave, and walked with them to the fire doors

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