Emergency egress for the elderly in care home fire situations

Abstract

Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre-movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents.

Investigating Evacuation Behaviour in Retirement Facilities: Case Studies from New Zealand

“…The ageing world population is rapidly increasing due to decreasing mortality (Mamun et al, 2020, Folk et al, 2020. An ageing population increases the challenges when evacuating built environments (Peacock and Averill, 2011;Spearpoint and MacLennan, 2012;Pichler et al, 2015;Folk et al, 2020).…”

“…The ageing world population is rapidly increasing due to decreasing mortality (Mamun et al, 2020, Folk et al, 2020. An ageing population increases the challenges when evacuating built environments (Peacock and Averill, 2011;Spearpoint and MacLennan, 2012;Pichler et al, 2015;Folk et al, 2020). Conducting an effective, safe and timely evacuation in some buildings, such as retirement facilities, can be challenging, as building occupants are elderly and may have reduced mobility (Pichler et al, 2015;Folk et al, 2020).…”

“…An ageing population increases the challenges when evacuating built environments (Peacock and Averill, 2011;Spearpoint and MacLennan, 2012;Pichler et al, 2015;Folk et al, 2020). Conducting an effective, safe and timely evacuation in some buildings, such as retirement facilities, can be challenging, as building occupants are elderly and may have reduced mobility (Pichler et al, 2015;Folk et al, 2020). This means that a large percentage of occupants may be reliant upon staff assistance in order to evacuate in case of a fire emergency.…”

“…data on pre-evacuation times, walking speeds, evacuation times, etc.). It is important that the limitations of these drills are documented alongside the data presented to ensure data validity and reliability (Gwynne and Boyce, 2016;Rahouti et al, 2020;Folk et al, 2020). Data collection during the evacuation of retirement facilities is rare, and of those studies that collected evacuation data in these facilities, most collected qualitative data.…”

“…Other drills have been carried out in Canada by Folk et al (2020). They analysed nine announced fire drills carried out at six Canadian retirement facilities.…”