Identifying fire safety in hospitals: Evidence from Changsha, China

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, fires occurred frequently in hospitals managing COVID-19, and caused over 279 deaths. Fire safety in hospitals should be identified clearly and taken seriously. Fire probability and fire service coverage for hospitals from a national perspective in China were analyzed in this study. Calculated with the generalized Barrois model, the annual fire frequency of hospital building exceeds 0.5, when its floor area reaches approximately 180,000 m(2). Based on the number of hospital fires in Changsha and that of hospitals in China from 2014 to 2017, the average annual fire probability of a hospital in China was calculated to be 0.017. The total effective coverage rate (TECR) of fire service for hospitals in Changsha, China was estimated to be between 11.82 % and 25.74 %, based on real-time travel times extracted from the Baidu Map. The TECR of national fire service for hospitals was estimated to be between 14.18 % and 30.89 %, according to the ratio of the number of hospitals and the number of fire stations in China to that in Changsha. Currently, recruiting medical staff as fire volunteers can quickly improve fire safety in hospitals for a low cost.