Human behaviour during a healthcare facility evacuation drills: Investigation of pre-evacuation and travel phases

Abstract

Evacuation models are key tools to assess the fire safety of complex buildings. Those tools and their results rely on the input values selected by users based on existing datasets and the way they are transformed into output. Several evacuation studies have been carried out to provide input values for evacuation models. However, those regarding healthcare facilities evacuation are still rare in the literature.In this paper, we present a new evacuation dataset for healthcare facility evacuation simulation. The data was collected from an outpatients’ area of a public hospital in Auckland (New Zealand) during two unannounced fire drills. The video images were analysed to generate new evacuation model inputs for healthcare facility evacuation scenarios. The drills involved both staff and patients. Pre-evacuation times, evacuee horizontal travel speeds, exit selection and total evacuation times were collected and analysed. Moreover, we investigated evacuee reactions and actions to study staff and patients’ interaction during the evacuation process.The results showed that pre-evacuation time of patients ranges from 8 to 63 s; while, pre-evacuation time of staff ranges from 8 to 141 s. In addition, during the movement phase, staff who were not assisting patients, and patients with no impairments, travelled at a similar average walking speed (i.e. 1.06 m/s for staff members and 0.93 m/s for patients with no impairments). Finally, the results indicated that the average travel speed of patients with walking impairments and staff assisting them was almost half of the travel speed of the first two groups (i.e. 0.52 m/s).