A Study on Nursing Personnel Operations to Ensure Evacuation Safety during Medical Facility Disasters
-
Published:2024-01-18
Issue:2
Volume:16
Page:838
-
ISSN:2071-1050
-
Container-title:Sustainability
-
language:en
-
Short-container-title:Sustainability
Author:
Kim Yongjoo1ORCID, Kim Junghyeon2, Kim Moonsik2, Rie Dongho3ORCID
Affiliation:
1. Graduate School of Safety Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Republic of Korea 2. Department of Safety Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Republic of Korea 3. Fire Disaster Prevention Research Center of Safety Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Republic of Korea
Abstract
Worldwide, the number of users of medical facilities is increasing due to the pandemic phenomenon and extended life expectancy. In addition, the majority of medical facility occupants are patients, leading to issues of inconvenience in movement and increased vulnerability during evacuations in the event of a fire. Therefore, the availability of nursing personnel, who serve as assistants in tasks such as transporting beds and wheelchairs essential for patient evacuation, is crucial for ensuring evacuation safety. However, a global shortage of nursing personnel has led to ongoing research on optimizing workforce allocation. In this study, the Available Safe Egress Time (ASET) and Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) were quantitatively compared for medical facilities with a combination of intensive care units and general wards, utilizing a Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and Flexsim Healthcare simulations to assess fire risk. The research goal here is to provide sustainable research directions for determining the minimum ratio of nurses to patients required for evacuation in a disaster, ensuring the continuous availability of nursing personnel in medical facilities. To achieve this, the variable was set to five stages based on the total number of patients per nurse. As a result of this study, it was confirmed that when the nurse-to-patient ratio exceeded 1:6, more than 70% of bedridden patients died. Additionally, it was verified that maintaining a patient-to-nurse ratio of less than 1:1 is effective for ensuring evacuation safety.
Subject
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment,Geography, Planning and Development,Building and Construction
Reference34 articles.
1. OECD Homepage (2023, October 16). OECD Health Statistics 2023. Available online: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-data.htm. 2. Spherical Fuzzy Present Worth Analysis Method for Emergency Hospital Investment Analysis;Seker;IEEE Trans. Eng. Manag.,2023 3. Almuqbil, M., Almoteer, A.I., Suwayyid, A.M., Bakarman, A.H., Alrashed, R.F., Alrobish, M., Alasalb, F., Alhusaynan, A.A., Alnefaie, M.H., and Altayar, A.S. (2023). Characteristics of COVID-19 Patients Admitted to Intensive Care Unit in Multispecialty Hospital of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: A Retrospective Study. Healthcare, 11. 4. Standards for nurse staffing in critical care units determined by: The british association of critical care nurses, the critical care networks national nurse leads, royal college of nursing critical care and in-flight forum;Bray;Nurs. Crit. Care,2010 5. Implementation of best practices for emergency response and recovery at a large hospital: A fire emergency case study;Bongiovanni;Saf. Sci.,2017
|
|