Fire Doors for Hospitals
Safety issues are among the main concerns of any hospital management. The buildings, including the structure and contents, require impeccable organisation and planning, and the people inside, be they staff or patients, need to be protected, with every possible scenario accounted for.
Managers and staff work around the clock in order to keep hospitals up to date, safe, and clean so that they are safe as workplaces, as accommodation for patients and as venues for cutting edge healthcare and surgery. The infra-structure of a hospital can be just as vital as the behaviour of those inside them, and the policies that are in place, to keep them secure and comfortable, and to ensure that those inside them can use them for the purposes for which they are needed.
Fire hazards can be a real concern within hospitals. They are more common within healthcare environments than you might imagine, but when you consider that hospitals are host to numerous types of flammable materials (oxygen tanks, medical supplies, hygienic products, kitchen supplies, for instance) as well as complex equipment, such as MRI machines and other electrical devices, the need for a well implemented fire safety plan becomes clear.
The ability to contain a fire within a small portion of a building is absolutely essential, should the worst happen. Fire doors are an invaluable tool to help with this and when they are properly designed and built to a high standard they can make a real difference to how outbreaks of fire and contained and managed.
From a structural engineering point of view, selecting the best materials and placing crucial equipment in accessible and easy-to-operate locations within the building and the premises, and the strategic installation of properly designed fire doors have all proven crucial in the containment of fires. These doors effectively act as partitions, sealing each segment and creating compartments within a building. Good quality fire doors are not only effectively fireproof, but they must also create a smoke barrier, blocking dangerous gases and fumes that might be produced during one of these incidents.
Recent high profile hospital fires have led to calls from safety experts for hospitals to “step up fire safety”, including having systems to regularly check all the fire defences that are in place. Bob Parkin from Marsden Fire Safety highlighted that an important factor for fire safety in hospitals was compartmentation, which is, “the way a facility is built to contain any fire in a particular area without it spreading elsewhere”.
The benefit of this is that the number of patients who need to be physically evacuated from the hospital building is reduced because they can be kept in relative safety for an hour or more. This is only the case when the patients, staff and equipment are safely inside a compartment protected by proper fire doors.
The seal and frame of a fire door are just as important as the door itself, because a well-built door which allows smoke and heat to pass around its edges is of little protection. Hospitals must therefore ensure that they do get their fire doors properly fitted and hung to maximise safety and reduce any risk even further.
Many accidents within hospitals can be prevented by the proper handling and use of equipment and chemicals. How well members of staff are following the best practice and health and safety guidelines should be regularly monitored because it is far better to avoid the possibility of a fire than to deal with one when it breaks out. However, for when the worst happens the physical infrastructure of the hospital building is just as significant as effective staff training, for fire prevention. Top quality fire doors will help with containment and compartmentation, and can reduce physical damage as well as save lives.
