What to watch and avoid when designing fire and life safety systems in hospitals and health care facilities.
Fire and life safety insights
- The Q&A highlights how designing fire and life safety systems in hybrid hospital and research environments requires balancing patient protection with the preservation of sensitive equipment and high-value laboratory work.
- Engineers described strategies such as targeted evacuation messaging, animal-safe alarm frequencies and tightly coordinated smoke compartmentation to ensure fire and life safety performance without disrupting clinical or research operations.
- The discussion also shows how expanding data, battery and specialty lab spaces continue to reshape fire and life safety requirements in modern health care buildings.
What are some of the unique challenges regarding fire/life safety system design that you’ve encountered for such projects? How have you overcome these challenges?
Meagan Gibbs: There is a unique contrast in the fire and life safety requirements of a research space like and a more traditional in-patient hospital structure.
For in-patient health care spaces, the challenge mostly revolves around egress and protection of spaces that include people who cannot evacuate a facility without assistance. The solution involves coordination between architects, engineers and facilities management and operational personnel to establish smoke barrier partitions and sprinkler systems that create shelter in place zones to create areas on each floor where non-ambulatory people can be moved to safety easily without requiring a full facility evacuation.
For research spaces where there are no non-ambulatory patients present, the challenge and emphasis shifts to the protection of sensitive equipment and clean-room lab spaces. In a recent Midwest project we designed, special attention was paid for the protection of specialized MRI spaces which have unusual requirements related to shielding and non-ferrous material to avoid damage or interference with their sensitive and powerful magnets. For clean room lab spaces, special sprinklers are specified so that research can be protected without compromising the standards required of a clean room.
The project combines two unique building occupancy types that require special considerations when designing the fire life safety systems. This is a high riser facility that houses both laboratory research and standard office spaces. A high riser facility and laboratory present uniquely different sets of design challenges.
High-rise buildings are defined as a building with an occupied floor 75 feet above the main exit floor. It becomes very challenging to design a system capable of notifying and directing the evacuation of occupants from the upper floors. Most standard buildings utilize a universally recognizable audible tone, such as a horn or chime, to notify occupants of an emergency and the requirement for full evacuation of the building. This is not possible nor desirable in a high-rise building, as the stairwells can become overwhelmed with evacuees from floors that are not under immediate threat. For these situations, the use of automated voice messages is the prescriptive approach. The life safety notification system is designed such that a professionally recorded evacuation message is played for the floors that are deemed in immediate danger – including the floor where the fire is reported, the floor above it and the floor below. The other floors not receiving the evacuation message receive an alert message – notifying them that there is an emergency in the building and to be prepared for further instructions. This targeted approach allows occupants in immediate danger to evacuate more effectively.
Laboratory and Research facilities pride themselves on the research work being performed. The work being performed at a research facility will include millions of dollars worth of research experiments and specialized equipment. This type of research routinely uses small mammals such as mice and rats as part of the studies. It has been discovered that the tones and frequencies typically used for fire alarm notification, while annoying to people, are quite harmful to smaller mammals who exhibit a much higher sensitivity to audible frequencies. During routine testing of the fire alarm notification system, the standard audible frequency has been noted to induce high levels of stress and even fatalities amongst the small mammals. With the critical nature of the research taking place, the loss of even one test subject can be catastrophic, potentially setting a test study back by months or years costing millions of dollars in lost time and resources. To prevent this, we use audible notification devices designed to produce animal friendly low frequency tones that do not harm the animals.
Jason Butler: The basic premise of hospital emergencies, to defend in place and protect patients with evacuation as a last resort, place a huge emphasis on fire protection and life-safety systems. Critical to overcoming these challenges is a sound life-safety assessment and clear understanding of facility response procedures and capabilities.
Richard Vedvik: Speech intelligibility of voice fire alarm or emergency communication systems remains a challenge in our industry. The primary hurdle is centered around designers and engineers understanding building acoustics and performing the necessary intelligibility calculations during design. It is faulty to assume the contractor or vendor can make up for poor device locations in programming or speaker tap settings. Designers need to coordinate with the Architect and Interiors Designers to ensure reverberation times in large, open spaces are well controlled.
Jon Sajdak: One of the most complex systems in health care facilities is the fire alarm system. There are a variety of building systems that require interfacing with, including but not limited to security, mechanical, elevators and fire protection. A key principle of health care facilities is the defend in place evacuation strategy, which requires robust passive fire protection systems throughout the building. The fire alarm system plays a key role in ensuring opening protectives (such as dampers and doors) close in the event of a fire to prevent the spread of smoke across smoke compartments. Once these items are coordinated in the design phase, it is critical that all fire alarm system components are tested and commissioned individually and with other building systems to verify the appropriate sequence of operations. Some keys to success in implementing these systems include bringing the installing fire alarm contractor onboard during the design phase and ensuring the engineer of record participates in frequent site walks with the contractor to ensure compliant installation.
How have the trends in fire/life safety changed in hospitals?
Meagan Gibbs: The biggest changes for fire and life safety in hospital spaces is the growing presence of data spaces and backup battery power rooms. The evolution and expansion in the importance of these spaces has required a response to the increased hazards presented by battery fires; as well as the importance of preventing accidental sprinkler discharge in data storage spaces.
Richard Vedvik: Requirements for smoke dampers have changed recently, specifically the clarification for what a fully ducted system is. Previously, Code was interpreted that any flexible ductwork, that’s commonly used to connect to diffusers, would not constitute a fully ducted system. Recently, that has been clarified to allow flexible duct in a fully-ducted system, which has reduced the amount of fire smoke dampers required. We are seeing Owners wanting to minimize the number of fire smoke dampers to reduce the maintenance burden they cause.
Jon Sajdak: Mass notification systems are becoming more prevalent in health care facilities. These are essentially emergency voice fire alarm systems that have additional capabilities to transmit information and instructions to occupants using text signs, graphics and other visual or audible notification appliances. These systems can relay alerts and messages for non-fire related events including, but not limited to, weather alerts, terrorist threats, security breaches and natural disasters. These systems require a risk analysis to be performed with input from the engineer and facility to ensure all safeguards are implemented into the design of the system.
What fire, smoke control and security features might you incorporate in these facilities that you wouldn’t see on other projects?
Caleb Marvin: One unique feature sometimes found in health care facilities is a smoke evacuation system in anesthetizing locations. While the latest codes and standards no longer require this system, NFPA used to require special ventilation to evacuate smoke where anesthesia gases were used to protect the patient and surgical team in an emergency. Many existing facilities still operate with these systems in place. In some jurisdictions, notably the State of Texas, renovations require that these legacy smoke purge systems either remain operational or be fully decommissioned in their entirety, which can be costly. Even though new health care facilities are no longer designed with these systems, it is important to understand these older system functions and sequences of operation to coordinate the new system design. Also, existing smoke evacuation systems must be fully functional for inspections and commissioning in any renovation project.
Meagan Gibbs: One of the key differences that you will see in these spaces is the use of specialty clean room sprinkler heads in clean space laboratories which are designed to limit dust or debris present in sensitive spaces. Another difference is the use of non-ferrous sprinkler heads in spaces which have equipment with powerful magnets. Ferrous materials can be damaged by and cause damage to expensive pieces of equipment such as MRI’s which is not a common issue outside of these very specialized spaces.
Jason Butler: For many critical and high value equipment spaces, pre-action sprinkler systems are often incorporated, to keep water filled piping out of the room. As a next level of protection, many facilities are also electing to include, in addition to pre-action, clean agent fire suppression systems to further protect significant equipment investments and guard against significant downtime that could occur when water based fire protection systems are activated.
Richard Vedvik: Because hospitals do not evacuate in the event of a fire, the associated systems need to be designed and installed with resiliency in mind. That means they are designed around defend in place strategies, requiring the designer to carefully communicate code requirements with the client and to coordinate that design with the architect’s life safety plans. One example is the methodology to control fire smoke dampers and other smoke management or control systems within the building.
Jon Sajdak: Health care facilities are required to have smoke compartments, which are not mandatory in most other occupancies. Because of the defend in place strategy that these facilities implement, smoke control is imperative to ensure tenable conditions are maintained in the adjacent areas from where a fire event occurs. Fire barriers, smoke barriers and smoke partitions, are all used to protect patient care areas from other hazardous spaces.
Regarding security features, some health care facilties that treat infants or small children typically have an infant abduction system. These systems typically require a delayed egress sequence to ensure areas of the hospital can be locked down, while still permitting free egress in the event of a fire.
How has the cost and complexity of fire protection systems involved with hospital/health care projects changed over the years? How did these changes impact the overall design process?
Meagan Gibbs: For health care and research spaces the biggest impact on fire protection has been a hidden one. The concealed spaces above the ceilings of these buildings has become increasingly densely packed with additional equipment related to data and communication integration, improved HVAC and medical gas systems, as well as electrical requirements. The amount of behind-the-scenes equipment in these spaces has increased vastly in the last few decades. These changes have forced an evolution that places a great deal of emphasis on early design using 3D design and rendering software to ensure that there are no conflicts between all the systems running above the ceiling. For fire sprinkler systems which require sprinkler pipes and heads in every room this can be particularly challenging and has placed an increased burden on the front-end design and coordination of these spaces.
Jason Butler: As code requirements tend to increase over time, there is a trend to more strenuous fire protection systems, whether that is smoke control, stair pressurization, fire shutters, etc. Often there are different solutions to life safety challenges, some are passive solutions and others are active solutions. The maintenance burden on facility staff should not be underestimated and a good design process should take operational considerations over the life of the building into account.
Richard Vedvik: Because hospitals do not evacuate in the event of a fire, the associated systems need to be designed and installed with resiliency in mind. That means they are designed around defend in place strategies, requiring the designer to carefully communicate code requirements with the client and to coordinate that design with the architect’s life safety plans. One example is the methodology to control fire smoke dampers and other smoke management or control systems within the building. Using new devices is usually required due to aging protocols and device obsolescence, which allows for a smooth transition from old to new
How do you ensure that the design of fire and life safety systems in health care facilities meets the unique needs of patients with limited mobility?
Meagan Gibbs: Fire and life safety codes dictate the requirements for patients with limited mobility, however, the requirements can be complex, conflicting and sometimes introduce grey areas. We find the key to this and meeting the unique needs of people in these spaces, is to meet not just the letter of the code, but the intent. The intent of the code is to protect the lives and safety of the people in a spaces and we make sure we meet the intent by employing people from different aspects of fire and life safety community. Fire and Life Safety professionals include former building code officials and fire sprinkler and fire alarm contractors and also emergency response individuals such as fire fighters who have on the ground real-world experience about what matters in emergencies involving people with limited mobility.
Richard Vedvik: Within health care facilities, the designer needs to understand the acuity of the patients in each place and department. Where patients are not capable of self-evacuation, it becomes the responsibility of the staff to ensure patient safety. Private mode annunciation is allowable in patient care areas where staff will be responsible for relocation and that design option can reduce fear and stress on the patient while allowing staff to control the relocation event. Because hospitals are defend-in-place, it’s important to alert staff on the situation. Providing fire alarm annunciator panels at nurse stations is one way to achieve that goal, but it’s desirable to remove supervisory and trouble signals from those annunciators to reduce alarm fatigue.
Jon Sajdak: Health care occupancies have shorter travel distance, common path and dead-end allowances than most other occupancies and also require a maximum 200 foot travel distance to reach another smoke compartment from any portion of the facility. These safeguards ensure that occupants can be relocated to a safe location in an adjacent part of the building, especially those that are in need of assistance during an evacuation. During the design process, accumulation spaces must also be accounted for in accordance with NFPA 101. This is a calculation that determines an acceptable amount of space is available in the adjacent smoke compartments for occupants when they are relocated during an evacuation.
What passive and active fire and life safety systems are you incorporating? What’s their impact?
Meagan Gibbs: In a recent project, we incorporated a comprehensive fire suppression system, including a fire pump and standpipe network, to ensure sprinkler coverage and firefighter support across all floors of the facility. This system is designed to prioritize occupant safety while accommodating the unique requirements of sensitive research environments.
Specialty sprinkler heads and valves are used in critical areas to mitigate the risk of accidental discharge and potential damage. These components are carefully selected to protect delicate equipment and research materials without compromising fire safety standards.
The overarching goal of the sprinkler system is to deliver reliable fire protection that supports life safety, while maintaining the environmental conditions necessary for advanced research. This balance ensures that safety and operational integrity coexist seamlessly throughout the facility.
