Fire Safety In Hospital Buildings, With Performance-Based Analysis

The risk of fire in a public building is a topic of extreme importance for the safety of the population in general, and for the safeguarding of the occupants and equipment in that building. The publication of Fire Safety Regulations aim to improve the conditions for preparing buildings in the event of a fire. In this sense, it is important to analyze the fire safety conditions in existing buildings, so that safety is not only verified in new buildings. Particularly, in Hospital buildings, special care must be taken to safeguard them, mainly due to the difficulty in evacuating bedridden people and people with limited mobility needing medical assistance, also taking into account that, since the initial construction, buildings may undergo changes in their valences over time.

In this paper, the subject of the safety of hospital buildings is addressed, with a particular study of a private clinic with inpatient and external consultations, where the evacuation plan was analyzed and articulated with the numerical modelling of the fire propagation, as well as with the evacuation of the building, to assess whether the security measures implemented are adequate to safeguard the lives and property of the building under study. The case study is an existing clinic in the city of Coimbra. In the building, a survey was made of all potential hazards influencing the fire risk. Different fire scenarios were considered with the focus on the evacuation of people in beds, in which the help of two or four persons in needed.

The main objective of the study is to evaluate whether the patients in this hospital are safe, and to test the evacuation plan, in such a way to attempt to improve it. Moreover, a special attention will be paid to the smoke evacuation system, to improve the visibility during evacuation.