Towards a Database for Hospital Evacuations in New Zealand

Dr Ruggiero Lovreglio, Senior Lecturer at Massey University’s School of Built Environment, provides an update on new preliminary research into preparation times and evacuation speeds for hospital evacuations.

Simulating hospital evacuation for fire engineering design is still a major challenge. Given the impermeant of the patients in Post Anaesthetic Care Units (PACUs) and Intense Care Units (ICUs), these simulations require to simulate assisted evacuation processes. The process of evacuating the units is visualised in the conceptual model proposed by Rahouti et al. (2020), as shown in Figure 1.

To date, many new models have now expanded their algorithms to allow assisted evacuation, such as Pathfinder, buildingExodus or game engines. Further several preliminary studies have been carried out to generate data for preparation times and evacuation speeds for evacuees with reduced mobility. However, there is still a lack of data on the inputs to enter into these new assisted evacuation algorithms when simulating PACUs and ICUs.

A reliable simulation of assisted evacuation requires inputs on the preparation time of each simulated patient. The preparation time can be defined as the time required by hospital staff to get a patient ready to be evacuated. Hospital staff use this time to perform several activities, including informing patients about what is about to happen, unplugging patients from non-mobile equipment, and plugging patients to mobile equipment.

Figure 1: Schematic of ICUs and PACUs evacuation timeline.

To address this engineering challenge, a research team at Massey University I have been leading has started recording and analysing evacuation exercises carried out in Auckland hospitals to measure preparation time in PACUs and ICUs in 2019. To date, the research team has already collaborated with many District Health Boards across the country, and it has collected data from eight evacuation exercises that have taken place in the Auckland City Hospital and the North Shore Hospital.

This preliminary research has generated over 50 new data points for preparation times and evacuation speeds. The preliminary result of this research shows that ICU and PACU patients might require more than three minutes and more than two staff to move them toward a safe place, depending on their condition. Further, the results indicate that evacuation speeds while moving patients on beds can be well below 1m/s and these speeds can be drastically reduced when these beds are moved through complex geometries.

Another set of experiments is instead planned in the final months of 2022 at Taranaki Base Hospital and Hāwera Hospital in collaboration with Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand and Evacuation Now. As such, by the end of 2022, the research team aim to develop the biggest database for hospital evacuations to be presented at the next IAFSS conference in 2023 in Japan.

I would like to thank all the organisations who have supported his evacuation research with funding and time: SFPE-NZ chapter for the 2019 starting grant, FRG for its 2021 Micro Grant, Evacuation Now, WDHB and ADHB for their support in kindness and time.