A Study on Nursing Personnel Operations to Ensure Evacuation Safety during Medical Facility Disasters

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.