Development of design strategies to support evacuation process of hospital buildings in united states

The complete evacuation of hospital facilities is always a difficult and complex process. It has always been considered a last resort during any kind of threat. In recent years, the increasing number of manmade and natural disasters has generated a considerable interest in hospital evacuation issues, but very few studies have addressed this problem. The purpose of this study is to develop design strategies for hospital facilities to support the complete evacuation process. The following three objectives are considered for fulfilling the requirements of the study: (a) identify the disaster threats for hospital buildings that drive the need for complete evacuation, (b) develop an understanding of the consequences and complexities of hospital evacuation, and (c) form the design strategies based on threat analysis, case-studies and experts? reviews. For interpretation purposes, this study use the qualitative research with casebased reasoning approach to collect, summarize, and evaluate the recorded data. The study is only focused on design considerations of some specific parameters for hospital building evacuation design. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of bestsuited design strategies that could be adopted by healthcare architects or planners in order to develop their designs in ways that improve the hospital building evacuation process.