Hospital Evacuation under Fire: Risk Identification and Future Prospect

Fire accident remains one of the most significant challenges facing the safety management of hospitals. Existing statistics have shown that hospital fires always cause severe casualties when occurred, and how to safely evacuate people from hospital fires is significant yet has not been systematically investigated by now. In this paper, state-of-the-art studies in hospital evacuation under fire are discussed. First, we identify the risks in hospitals that may lead to fires and hinder the evacuation process. Next, the whole evacuation process under hospital fires is presented and discussed, along with our future prospects. The disabled patients and those involving the use of wheelchairs/medical beds are crucial roles during the evacuation, and many efforts should be devoted to them, including elevator evacuation and assistance from the medical staff. Moreover, integrating Building Information Modeling and facilities management for establishing effective evacuation strategies may be worth studying. We expect that this work could bring a more comprehensive insight for the architects and engineers to conduct fire safety design and management for hospitals.