Fire safety in the healthcare industry

The healthcare industry has changed a great deal in recent years. Social changes such as population ageing and budget cuts have caused an overhaul of the healthcare system. The number of healthcare providers is declining, even though the number of people requiring care is growing.

In nursing homes and supportive living facilities, too, these changes have caused a growing need for a different approach. Take 24/7 healthcare services, for instance. It will no longer go without saying that a nurse will always be on the premises 24/7. Nurses will increasingly serve multiple types of facilities. However, this situation does pose certain safety risks, in that the people residing at the facilities will generally not be able to get themselves to safety without help in the event of a fire.

The nature of the care services provided at healthcare institutions has changed a great deal since 2012, the year in which the current Building Code entered into force. As a result, the requirements to which healthcare facilities are subject under the Building Code are no longer properly aligned with the way in which facilities such as nursing homes, supportive living facilities etc. are currently being used. In addition, a study on the spread of smoke in residential buildings recently conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Public Safety (NIPV) showed that smoke develops and spreads faster than previously assumed. What this means is that people have less time to flee than previously believed, which constitutes a safety risk, particularly when the people residing in a building are unable to get themselves to safety without help.

In order to be better able to find the right solution for particular situations in healthcare facilities, organisations are increasingly switching to a risk-based approach to fire safety. This means that fire safety provisions are not just implemented to meet generic requirements laid down in the Building Code, but that risk analysis results are used to determine what kind of measures are required to realise a sufficiently high level of fire safety.

However, this raises the question as to when a building is sufficiently fire-proof.
If we wish to realise risk-based fire safety, it is crucial that we answer the foregoing question. We must answer this question to be able to determine when sufficient measures will have been taken to minimise the risks to a sufficient degree. Directors of healthcare organisations will have to arrive at some form of consensus about this in their own organisations. Afterwards, their ambitions will have to be recorded at the centralised level.

The fire safety policy is an essential document in the context of (risk-based) fire safety. However, many healthcare institutions have no, or an incomplete, fire safety policy, which means that the ambitions and objectives in terms of fire safety are not clearly established.
Volantis can offer support in this by working with you to design the fire safety policy, step by step, tailor-made for your organisation.