FIRE SAFETY
Bespoke misting system met many objectives
Ian Greggor, director, Estates and Facilities, at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, explains how a team including himself, the Trust’s Fire Safety specialist, Andrew Walker, ISS Medicare, and fire suppression system designer and installer, Vapourmist Solutions, developed a ‘bespoke’ fire misting system at Prospect Park Hospital near Reading to link into the facility’s existing smoke detection system, and also minimise the risk of self-harm or vandalism. The hospital incorporates inpatient wards – including a specialist dementia ward, and a specialist learning disabilities unit.
Patient bedrooms on mental health inpatient wards present a unique fire safety challenge. Very often the source of a fire will be a patient seeking to self-harm through fire-setting, or by using the fire safety provisions within the room as ligature points. Of course, the easiest solution, and a key first step, is thorough and regular searching to prevent patients from having the means to set fires, but the reality is that some items will make their way onto the wards. So, we must prepare for the possibility of fire, and Berkshire Healthcare NHS Trust has undertaken a root and branch review of its preparation at Prospect Park Hospital in Reading. In most NHS properties the
conventional wisdom has been to install sprinklers as the first response to fire. Sprinklers certainly suppress fire in its early stages, but would they save the life of the person in the room of origin? Sprinklers are triggered when the temperature at one of the detector heads reaches a certain point. However, the majority of fire deaths are through smoke inhalation, rather than burns, with the poisonous fumes in the smoke more of a factor than oxygen depletion. So, even a quick responding sprinkler head, set at a lower temperature of, for example, 57˚C, may not be triggered before anyone in a room would be very likely to succumb to smoke inhalation. Bedrooms at Prospect Park Hospital, which was built around 13 years ago, have lower ceilings similar to domestic bedrooms, so there is no large reservoir of space for smoke to fill before it moves to a lower level. It is quite conceivable that a sprinkler system would not save the life of the person in a room on fire – and this is ignoring the fact that a traditional sprinkler system introduces potential ligature points, even with drop-down type heads.
Triggered by heart and smoke In high-risk domestic premises, misting systems are increasingly seen as a better alternative to sprinklers. These systems are
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relied on early staff intervention – either with the usual extinguishers, or even with devices that are triggered and thrown into the room on fire. Neither of these seemed very reliable, so the Trust’s Safety specialist, Andrew Walker, decided to explore the misting route, and to consider how it could be made safe and effective in a mental healthcare setting.
The initial review considered standalone misting units, but these could not link into the main fire alarm system, and would also place an object in the room that a patient may be able to damage or pull away from the wall. With no ‘off-the-peg’ solutions, Andrew Walker needed to consider a new solution based on the principles of misting, but could a domestic system be linked to the existing smoke detection, and could a solution be found to the critical patient safety issues?
The Automist pump supplies water at 90 bars of pressure through four tiny nozzles.
positioned in the room of fire risk, and can be triggered by heat and smoke. Misting heads are very effective fire-suppressants due to the fine water particle size they achieve. The finer particles produce a greater water surface-area than the droplets produced by sprinklers, and therefore bring the heat down more efficiently. However, the Trust’s review noted that the domestic systems did not need to consider the potential for self- harm. On investigating other potential solutions, the Trust found only those that
A PFI healthcare facility Prospect Park Hospital is managed under the Private Finance Initiative by ISS Medicare, and its involvement in the project from the beginning was critical to ensure a practicable solution. Once Andrew Walker had decided on the possible solution, he identified Plumis Automist as a potential basis for our system. He and Andrew Fraser, General Manager, ISS Healthcare, contacted local approved Automist installer, Bracknell-based Vapourmist Solutions, to consider the practicalities of the proposal. The initial proposal to use the Plumis Smartscan system was ruled out due to the belief that this system would be too vulnerable to vandalism, but the Automist Fixed Wall Head provided a robust alternative.
Prospect Park Hospital has a Siemens fire alarm system, and we were assured at an early stage that the existing Siemens detectors could be used to trigger the Automist pump. This allowed the Trust to use highly efficient S-line multi-sensor detectors to reduce to a minimum the chances of a false signal setting off the
JULY 2020 | THE NETWORK
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