New Fire Protection Essential
High-risk moms, babies at heart of new maternity pavilion
- By Beth Welch
- Aug 01, 2012
Texas Children’s Hospital recently added
a new high-rise facility, the Pavilion
for Women, to its already impressive
five-building campus in the heart of the
Texas Medical Center in Houston. The
state-of-the-art pavilion, designed to
care for the highest-risk mothers and
babies, will offer a full continuum of
family-centered maternity care, with all
of the latest technologies and access to
world-renowned experts.
The new facility was outfitted with advanced
fire protection because the technology
is of critical importance to the nature
of care provided at Pavilion for Women,
said Lonnie Rinehart, the hospital’s plant
operations manager.
“For us, it all goes back to patient
safety—what can we do to keep our buildings
safe and our patients safer?” Rinehart
said. “On the eighth floor, we have babies
in neonatal intensive care that literally fit
in the palm of your hand. They can’t go
anywhere during a fire alarm—it’s all a
part of what we do to protect them.”
The new pavilion is essentially two towers—
one 15 floors, the other six floors—
that are connected at the base. The building
is an entire city block wide and two
football fields long and is packed with
cutting-edge fire alarm technologies, including
two NOTIFIER fire alarm control
panels, 538 smoke detectors, 248 ductmounted
detectors, 1,427 speaker/strobes
and 111 firefighter telephone jacks.
FireTron Inc., a local life safety systems
specialist, engineered and installed
the pavilion’s fire alarm system and will
perform the ongoing service, testing and
maintenance of the systems protecting
the hospital’s patient care facilities and
other buildings.
Detection and Response
Early detection of smoke and fire and the
virtual elimination of false alarms were
requirements for the new pavilion set by
the hospital.
Nearly all rooms in the new pavilion
were fitted with self-regulating detectors
that examine a combination of environmental
factors. Acclimate Plus detectors,
produced by System Sensor, scan for the
visual signatures of smoke and fire, as well
as unusual spikes in room temperatures.
Given the ever-changing needs of patients
and the equipment used within this
facility’s rooms, the detectors can automatically
adjust their own sensitivity settings
based on slow, minor changes within
their surrounding environment, all but
eliminating severely intrusive false alarms.
“By going to this newer system, we’ll
use more durable [detector] heads that
don’t activate with the same thing,” Rinehart
said. “We keep fire protection around
our patients at all times, we don’t alert
the fire department with nuisance calls
and business operations continue without
needless interruptions.”
Rooms used for respiratory treatment
had been problematic because aerosol
from one treatment would set off older detectors,
Rinehart said.
Given this history with the facility’s
older systems, FireTron equipped all respiratory
treatment areas with IntelliQuad
detectors, designed by System Sensor to
detect and examine four major signatures
of fire: smoke, heat, infrared and carbon
monoxide. Six levels of sensitivity enable
these specialized detectors to provide accurate
detection tailored to a particular
environment within facilities such as hospitals,
where early detection is essential.
Bob Kaczarek, FireTron’s vice president of sales and marketing, said there
were a few overarching goals inherent in
the pavilion installation.
“The main goal is to reduce false
alarms, and the other is to increase speed
of response,” Kaczmarek said. “It’s not
easy to get patients out of a high-rise hospital
quickly. You don’t want that to happen
in a hospital unless it’s the real deal—
unless you know for certain that there’s a
fire. And then they always want to know
where the fire is, where the alarm is coming
from—not just which tower; but they
want to know the room it’s in, the actual
physical location.”
An addressable fire alarm system has
the ability to pinpoint exact locations,
Rinehart said.
“If you’ve got 10,000 feet of corridor,
you’re immediately able to narrow down
the exact location of the fire,” Rinehart
said. “For us, faster response means greater
patient safety.”
When a smoke detector goes into
alarm, it’s easy to spot, too. Rinehart explains
that detectors have two red LED
lights that “glow nice and bright” when
they’re in alarm.
The goal is to respond to a situation
and arrive at the location quickly. If a detector
in a patient’s room alerts, the nurse
station is signaled so the nurses can get
right on the scene.
The hospital has a standard operating
procedure for fire alarms—a “Dr. Pyro”
team addresses the issue, Rinehart said.
The public isn’t alerted, and the system
sends out automatic preset emails, texts
and pages with critical information in the
event of an emergency. A nursing administrator
and predetermined teams of security
and engineering personnel respond to
the alarm. Security and engineering handle
the event until firefighters arrive, and
the nursing administrator commandeers
anyone needed to handle patient safety.
“It’s difficult to move a two-pound
neonatal patient,” Rinehart said. “We
evacuate horizontally across a patient
floor, moving everyone from one end of
the floor to the other, and then we defend
in-place.”
system that can target certain areas
with recorded emergency messages. In
addition, the system offers the flexibility
to give manual voice instructions via a
microphone, Kaczmarek said.
Integration and
Maintenance
“Our system is interfaced with all the security
doors in the building—if there is a fire
condition in the building, or on a floor, the
system unlocks doors on the fire floor and
floors above and below,” Kaczmarek said.
In Texas, he explains, there are safety
requirements to have smoke removal systems
in all hospital operating rooms.
“We had to integrate between the
Honeywell building management system
(BMS) and our system to accomplish
that,” Kaczmarek said. “We basically tell
the BMS when to open and close fire and
smoke dampers and when to start exhaust
fans—so if there is a fire in the operating
room, it deals with the smoke. The equipment
itself, due to the tremendous flexibility
in the system software and programming,
really makes it easier to handle these
complex applications.”
The new technology allows for ease
of maintenance, informing operators of
a smoke detector in need of cleaning or
some other attention. Using the keyboard
at any of the fire alarm control panels,
operators also can temporarily bypass detectors
or other devices when performing
maintenance on the system.
FireTron has barcoded all device
heads, strobes, panels and other interfaces.
Every test, every replacement and every
alert on each device can be compiled into
a report, allowing for greater detailing of
maintenance and tracking of efficiency.
The reports are then given to authorities
having jurisdiction.
Monitoring
The fire alarm systems protecting the five
buildings comprising Texas Children’s
Hospital, plus its new pavilion, are monitored
within the hopsital’s own central
command center. Rinehart says the recent
construction provided the opportunity to
move and upgrade the Service Response
Center (SRC) to a more ideal location
within the pavilion.
Fire, security and medical gas monitoring
are just a few of the building systems
closely supervised by the hospital’s SRC.
“Anything that happens in the hospital
will go through that hub,” Rinehart said.
“Kind of picture a NASA control room,
if you would.”
The new SRC will also include the latest
graphic workstation that provides detailed
graphical layouts of each building and all
major fire alarm components. Notifications
of all devices in alarm are immediately displayed
on facility maps, along with information on the cause of the alarm, enabling
a fast assessment and response.
Backward Harmony
One significant advantage of the new fire
alarm system is backward compatibility,
Rinehart said: “Old technology plays well
with new technology as it’s added, and
that’s important.”
Fire alarm control panels installed
more than 20 years ago in the hospital’s
five other buildings have held up well.
Given the old technology’s innate backward
compatibility, those will be phased
out and replaced with the latest NFS-3030
panels throughout the next year.
“If we can keep the majority of the system
in place and only have to replace the
panels, for instance, that’s cost-savings to
us, but it’s also less intrusive for our patients,
staff and visitors,” Rinehart said.
“It keeps the continuity of the business
together.”
Planning for the Future
Kaczmarek and Rinehart have advice for
other large healthcare campuses undertaking
massive expansions.
“The most important thing is flexibility
within your campus,” Kaczmarek said.
“What I try to tell customers is put in a
system that is networkable to other locations
because things change.”
For example, moving the Texas Children’s
Hospital SRC from one building to
the new pavilion will be quite an undertaking,
but it will not involve moving a thousand
miles of wire. Kaczmarek said all
he’ll need is one piece of fiber-optic cable
to connect the new center with the hospital’s
technology network.
“It provides an organization with the
flexibility to do the different things it
wants to do when buildings are added instead
of spending hundreds of thousands
of dollars,” Kaczmarek said.
FireTron is working with Texas Children’s
Hospital on a five-year plan to incorporate
technology upgrades, maintenance
and other investments.
“The backward compatibility is where
it really saves the customer money,” Kaczmarek
said. “They may only have ‘X’ number
of capital dollars to spend in 2012, so
we can provide them with incremental upgrades
so they don’t have to spend more.”
Rinehart said the key is partnering with
a strong, experienced system provider, like
FireTron.
“FireTron is good at keeping us abreast
of changing technologies,” he said. “They
don’t wait for us to ask
for it—they bring it to
us, keeping us right at the
forefront.”
This article originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of Security Today.