An Approach to Provide Cost Effective Patient Fire Safety

A study of employing a performance-based approach and fire safety engineering to healthcare facilities planning and design, in order to develop holistic optimum fire safety solutions, is presented. Optimum fire safety solutions are desirable because there are a number of hazards in healthcare facilities that can impact on patient safety, and fire is only one of them. If the same level of fire safety can be achieved through a more cost effective means, then the savings can be utilised to address other patient safety hazards, for instance, infections, treatment delays, slips, trips and falls. By using a case study on the provision of smoke control systems for the new Acute Hospital building at the Royal North Shore Hospital, the significant benefits of developing and implementing a holistic optimum smoke control strategy instead of purely following what is prescribed in the building code are demonstrated. A close collaboration between the fire safety engineer, the architect, the operators and the users of the healthcare building would however be needed to ensure the fire safety strategy works in harmony with and not opposition to healthcare objectives.