Safety and traffic bollards provide vital protection for hospitals

Security bollards to protect hospitals from vehicles ramming into buildings are becoming increasingly important to ensure safety and prevent costly damage to buildings and security equipment, and hospital architecture experts recommend separating emergency vehicles from rest of the traffic at the emergency entrances. The recent bombing attempt by a parked car in New York City’s Times Square has raised concerns among security planners for hospitals, along with other types of facilities, about perimeter security.

Hospitals are especially vigilant about safety near emergency rooms, where other types of vehicle problems can occur, including patients trying to drive to the emergency room when they have a medical crisis, such as a heart attack or after an injury. The increasing use of glass walls and the rising costs of property damage, including metal detection and other security measures at the entrance that are considered vital in many hospitals today, are additional factors in security planning. hospitable.

Safety bollards are an inexpensive way to prevent rams and keep vehicles a safe distance from structures. Security bollards are usually steel posts embedded in the ground with concrete. After 9/11, the US State Department developed what it calls a K-rating system, which calculates the strength of bollards based on the size and speed of a vehicle that could be driven into a building . The classifications are based on the diameter and structure of the bollard, its depth in the ground, and the number and type of foundations that anchor it.

To present a welcoming look, rather than a bunker at entrances, many hospitals use decorative bollard covers over their security bollards. Retractable or removable traffic bollards are also employed in areas where a change of access may be required. Architects who specialize in hospital design suggest that new or renovated emergency department (ED) facilities separate the entrances for emergency vehicles from the drop-off door for people who are herded to emergency rooms by friends or family members, or who drive themselves, to improve treatment as well as safety for patients.

Individual entrances to emergency rooms become “highly congested, chaotic, and just plain unsafe. The fundamental change in ED design began to manifest separate entrances for the two types of traffic,” wrote James W. Harrell, an architect specializing in healthcare colleges for GBBN Architects with offices in the US and China, and founder of the American College of Healthcare Architects, in Asian Hospital and Health Care Management. He recommends separate entrances that “should begin upon arrival on campus and continue to each entrance,” marking only the entrance for outpatients, those arriving in private vehicles. Bollards are frequently used to separate flow and direct traffic to specific areas.

Tony W. York (CHPA, CPP), senior vice president of Hospital Shared Services in Denver and co-author of Hospital and Healthcare Security, 5th Edition, told Directions, a newsletter published by the International Association for the Safety and Security of Healthcare , in January that “we have been using bollards and they have had a residual effect in protecting the walls and the actual entry points to the facility itself. We have had great success, even at the ambulance or ambulatory entrance, with bollards, making sure we wouldn’t allow certain levels of penetration. That’s become a pretty common safeguard for organizations, especially those that have done some type of renovation or new construction.”