Evacuation of bedridden occupants:experimental research outcomes

Bedridden building occupants in hospitals and nursing homes who are not able to rescue themselves in case of a fire emergency require assistance during an evacuation. A building emergency team usually fulfils this function and will have to remove the occupants from the room. The speed at which such an evacuation is conducted however is unknown. Experiments in practice were conducted in hospitals to obtain insight in the evacuation speed and absolute evacuation times required. Furthermore, a simulation was conducted to obtain values on the available safe egress time. Comparing the experimental results with the simulation results indicates that a safe evacuation strongly depends on the arrival time of the building emergency team at the room in question. Furthermore the experiments show that many of the people who conducted the evacuations were insufficiently trained for this