This month a tragic fire incident claimed lives of 10 babies in a hospital in spite of heroic effort from the hospital staff to save the babies in neonatal unit.
Fact is every hospital is expected to install fire alarms over all patient-sensitve zone and it is also a fact that every year loss of lives happen in fire incidents in hospitals. Here is another incident that claimed lives in hospital in Delhi this year. An extensive study jointly carried by Department of HSE and Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehra Dun and Centre for Pollution Control and Environmental Engineering, Pondicherry University, found electrical short circuit as the predominant reason for such fires. Full lists of the incidents that they studied can be found here .
Electrical short circuit
Often, the post-incident analysis finds electrical short circuits as the reason. But they conspicuously silent about why the short circuit was not detected early?
Ideally electrical circuit monitoring system would alarm for any electrical shorts in the system. Typically modern circuit-breakers switch off a circuit when anomaly is detected. We do not know if that was in place or if it did not work.
There are also some incidents that started from gas appliance or kitchen stove.
Tracking zone-based temperature for better indicator
Every fire incident starts small and if the temperature at sensitive zones are continuously monitored, sudden change of temperature can be used as early indicator for fire and administrator can be warned in advance before the fire become devastating.
Another option could be to monitor ambient light in sensitive zones and any sudden spike of lumens reported could be considered as early warning.
Thankfully both can be easily implemented with a good flexible RTLS system at a very small cost. Not all RTLS require the hospital to adopt every features offered. A hospital can implement only temperature or light monitoring solution at a fractional cost of full-feature RTLS.
INDTRAC RTLS supports modular solution
INDTRAC RTLS has multiple modules and flexible options. It also lets the hospital pick sensor hardware of its choice, unlike most of the existing RTLS vendors. INDTRAC also lets a hospital implement for only a subset of its total area in order that the hospital manage its budget and cost better.
Summary
RTLS enabled microzone temperature monitoring may give a hospital early warnings to act and avoid the extensive fire related damage to its patients and facilities. Write to us to learn more.
A common argument from the hospital management is that RTLS is too expensive for the hospital to adopt. We asked an expert to provide us a simple ROI analysis for a 350-bed hospital to demonstrate how long it takes for a hospital to break even.