The Real Thing

The hospital caught on fire today. Just about the time I was leaving my house for work, one of the doctors went into one of the patient's rooms. As soon as he opened the door, smoke billowed out.



The patient was pulled out of the room, the door was slammed shut and a code red was announced. That is our protocol, PCAE. That means:



P-patient rescue

C-contain the fire

A- alarm

E-evacuate



Oh, I forgot to mention the evacuation part. No one can ever recall us ever evacuating before, but that is what happened. Smoke was rapidly filling the unit, so it was quickly decided to get the patients out.



The people who could walk were escorted to the other side of the fire doors. The people who couldn't walk were left behind. It sounds heartless, but we have to save the largest numbers of people possible and that means saving ambulatory patients first. Had the emergency worsened, I'm sure they would have gone back to save at least some of the bedridden patients. I think.



It was later determined that the fire was caused by a short in the wiring. No flames were ever seen, but it produced a ton of smoke. The engineers hopefully fixed the problem.



I do have a couple of concerns. Despite all of the smoke, the smoke detectors never alarmed. Perhaps they are just heat detectors. If so, that doesn't seem safe because as it was, we could have lost a patient to smoke inhalation and had a big fire before we even knew anything was going on in the patient's room.It was pure chance that someone went in the room and discovered the smoke before it was too late.



My second concern is that the firefighters never arrived. I know that we have false code reds several times a day, but what happens when there really is a fire? Does that mean we are on our own if there is a fire?



The crisis was over by the time I got to work. My shift was boring. Boring is good.