FIRE SAFETY
Managing a hospital fire detection system properly
Over the past year Apollo Fire Detectors has undertaken a thorough market research investigation into fire safety within the healthcare industry in the UK, led by head of Marketing, Irina Cruse, and her colleague, graduate project leader, Harry Buck. A key aspect was travelling across the UK to visit different types of hospital site, equipped with a range of different fire detection systems, to experience and understand the challenges of operating and maintaining them first-hand. As they report, talking to fire safety experts, and making connections through IHEEM, has helped Apollo gain some valuable insights.
There are over 1,200 NHS hospitals across the UK, spread across 223 NHS Trusts, with their buildings and estate ranging considerably in age and complexity. Few hospital estates comprise mainly single standalone buildings; instead the sites are usually made up of a complicated infrastructure network that has grown and developed over a few decades. This in turn increases the complexity of the fire detection systems needed across many such estates. Among the challenges in managing and maintaining a fire detection system in healthcare premises, and especially across a size hospital estate, that we discovered during our visits to hospitals and Apollo’s wider experience, are:
Cost of ownership n Management of an ageing system, and availability of replacement components.
n Contracts locked to a single supplier of fire protection services.
Structural challenges n Management of different detection systems within one hospital.
n Management of works and renovations in the hospital, while ensuring uninterrupted fire safety.
n Protection of temporary structures. n Maintenance of challenging wards that do not allow for interruption of services.
n Management of full or partial fire system upgrades.
Evacuation and fire strategy n Some buildings cannot be fully evacuated.
n Complex fire safety strategies. n Fire spread information is routinely used.
System performance issues within specific environments n False alarms. n HPV cleaning. n COVID-19 nebulising spray. n Contingency ward protection.
80 Health Estate Journal September 2020 13% 6%
component obsolescence, or because it is no longer supported by the manufacturer.
31% 50% n 0-5 years n 5-10 years n 10-20 years n 20+ years
Figure 1: Results of a national survey among healthcare fire officers on the age of fire detection equipment.
Cost of ownership
Many of the challenges associated with the management of an ageing system and immutable maintenance contracts could quite often have been avoided if the new sites/buildings had been delivered with consideration for future building evolution, system lifecycle, and total cost of ownership. Fire detection equipment is generally expected to last 10 years (FIA Guidance on the Life Expectancy of a Fire Detection & Alarm System Issue 1). However, the same equipment will often remain in place for up to 25 years. In a national survey carried out by Apollo, with the help of NAHFO, among healthcare fire officers (Fig 1), 50% of respondents described their system as between 10 and 20 years’ old, with a further 13% reporting a system over 20 years’ old. Older systems tend to be difficult to manage due to reduced system reliability. Varied faults can cause false alarms and unnecessary disruption to hospital operation, and this can result in fines. The biggest issues arise when the system cannot be maintained any longer due to
Limited component replacement A system renovation often only replaces sections of the system. Equipment such as detector heads and the control panel are likely to be replaced only if proven to be troublesome or prone to false alarms. Ideally, the fire detection system will have forward and backwards compatibility, meaning that a modern control panel can replace the ageing one without changing the detectors, and that modern, higher reliability detectors can be used in the current control panel to address false alarms. Thus, areas of the system can be updated and will work seamlessly with the original system. This gives the ability to manage specific issues and to be able to renovate the system in phases, spreading the cost and minimising disruption. It also ensures that even if some components have been made obsolete, there is a modern replacement available that will work reliably on the old infrastructure. Otherwise, it is possible that the whole system will require a full and immediate overhaul due to an unforeseen component obsolescence or non-compliance.
‘Locked’ into a contract The cost and complexity of renovation can vary dramatically, depending on the type of system installed. Some NHS sites have, in the past, experienced very high cost of ownership for closed protocol systems. Closed protocol can be described as a system where only a single supplier of installation and maintenance services is authorised to work with the fire system. The ownership of systems like this means that the building owner is locked into a contract, and the only way out is a full system replacement. The cost of replacement usually deters end-users from changing manufacturer, and they therefore usually have no choice but to
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