Egress from a hospital ward during fire emergency

There are many issues in a hospital evacuation, related both to conditions of the patients and to building complexity. Moreover, as consequences of fire, there may be delays in surgeries and medical diagnosis, or interruption in treatment for both inpatient and outpatient. This work identifies and assesses problems that arise in the egress from the ward located at third floor of the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital of Rome, using a simulation software. Moreover, we perform a comparison between simulation results and experimental results by means of a real fire drill. We have considered a maximum of 116 people in the ward to its maximum capacity. We have created three different fire scenarios: fire in the electrical room, in the kitchen room and in a patient room. The time needed to evacuate fully the ward was far behind the fire resistance time of the structures. More than that, there was an overcrowded area in the ward that acted as a bottleneck: the so-called “smoke proof filter”; this area is intended to separates the two near wards and, although built according to the Italian fire department regulation, it holds back people and beds.