Published by the
National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)
Ensure fire and life safety in health care facilities, and achieve compliance success with the roadmap to the 2005 NFPA 99!
Need more clarification on the added NFPA guidelines on pipe joining methods, fabric restrictions inside hyperbaric chambers, or any of the other changes in the 2005 NFPA 99? You'll find expert advice, examples, and more in the Health Care Facilities Handbook! Written by authorities who helped develop NFPA 99 and based on questions from the field, it's a ready source for answers to your application questions based on NFPA regulations.
Address critical issues involving patient and staff safety!
The Handbook contains the full standard text, insightful commentary, FAQs, plus hundreds of illustrations and photos - everything you need to handle any situation on the job. Commentary appears in blue so it's easy to distinguish from Standard requirements. It's a valuable resource for installers of hospital equipment, safety engineers, facilities managers and directors, architects, engineers, design firms, AHJs, inspectors, and enforcers.
From the Preface
NFPA 99, Standard for Health Care Facilities, is the result of the integration of 12 documents developed over a 40-year period by the Health Care Facilities Correlating Committee (formerly the Committee on Hospitals). However, it is not the only document applicable to health care facilities - there are some 50 other NFPA documents either that address, in whole or in part, health care facilities or that can be used by health care facilities to address emergency or fire safety issues.
In categorizing fire protection for health care facilities, two general divisions of fire protection can be identified:
- Facility Fire Protection. Facility fire protection features, such as hydrants, types of structural protection, length of exit travel distances, and detection and extinguishing systems, are built into or around a structure to minimize hazards. They generally do not require human intervention to provide safety.
- Operational Fire Protection. Operational fire protection practices, such as safe use of inhalation anesthetics, safe use of electricity, safe practices in laboratories, use of emergency electrical power, and emergency planning, are intended to minimize fire hazards once the health care facility is occupied. These practices definitely rely on human intervention to provide safety.
Some items (such as portable extinguishers, manual pull stations, and performance criteria for grounding systems) can be categorized into either of the aforementioned divisions. In general, NFPA 99 is concerned with operational fire protection for the many activities occurring in hospitals, ambulatory health care centers, clinics, medical and dental offices, nursing homes, and limited care facilities. NFPA 99 includes provisions for patient care areas (e.g., wards, intensive care units, operating suites, hyperbaric and hypobaric facilities), certain laboratories, several facility-wide systems, and overall emergency planning for a facility in the event of an emergency (fire or otherwise) that interrupts the delivery of patient care.
The effort to combine these 12 health care facility documents began in late 1979 at the suggestion of Marvin J Fischer, the chairman of the Health Care Facilities Correlating Committee and vice-president for Facilities Planning and Engineering Services, Brookdale Hospital Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York. It was Mr Fischer's firm belief that combining these individual documents into one cohesive document would benefit health care personnel and patients, as well as designers, builders, and enforcing authorities. The correlating committee agreed, but to assure consensus among those affected by the proposed change, the committee solicited public comments on the idea in 1981. With overwhelming support, in January 1982 the committee proceeded with the initial step of publishing a compilation of the latest editions of each of the documents into one bound volume. This compilation was designated NFPA 99, Health Care Facilities Code.
The 1984 edition of NFPA 99 was the next step in the process: integration of the previous individual documents into one new document, with a format revised to follow the NPFA Manual of Style (all definitions in one chapter; requirements in the main body of the text; recommendations in the annexes). The 1987 edition of NFPA 99 completed this integration process by restructuring text into a format that placed nonfacility-specific requirements in one section and facility-specific requirements into another section. (See Section 1.5 in Chapter 1 for details.) Once the reorganization of the document began, the creation of a handbook on NFPA 99 was a natural extension of the document. With so much material in one document, assistance in the form of commentary seemed the best method to share some of the history of this material as well as to provide additional information and guidance in applying the standard to present conditions.
Codes and standards by themselves can be difficult to understand for those not involved in their development. However, it is not practical to include in these documents complete information on the requirement-adoption process (e.g., the reasons behind requirements, the pros and cons, the voting, the striving for consensus, the research, the discussion). Annex material can help the reader to better understand the codes and standards development process; recently, rationales for the committee's decisions have been stressed. Handbooks present another vehicle for helping readers to better understand the requirements and recommendations of a document.
It is my hope that this eighth edition of the Health Care Facilities Handbook will continue to add to the store of knowledge on health care fire safety and will prove to be a useful resource for all those involved in protecting health care facilities from fire and associated hazards.
-Richard P Bielen PE
