Safety bollards to protect hospitals from vehicles colliding with buildings are increasingly important to ensure safety and prevent costly damage to buildings and safety equipment, and hospital architecture experts recommend separating emergency vehicles from other traffic in the emergency entrances. The recent attempted bombing of a car parked in Times Square in New York City has raised concerns among hospital security planners, 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 rising property damage costs, including metal detection and other security measures at entrances considered vital today in many hospitals, are additional factors in planning for hospital security.
Safety bollards are an inexpensive way to avoid collisions and keep vehicles at a safe distance from structures. Security bollards are usually steel posts embedded in the ground with concrete. After September 11, the US State Department developed what it calls a K-rating system, which calculates the strength of the bollard according to the size and speed of a vehicle that could be driven into a building. Ratings are based on the diameter and structure of the bollard, its depth in the ground, and both the amount and type of foundation that anchors 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 used in areas where a change of access may be necessary. Architects who specialize in hospital design suggest that new or renovated emergency department (ED) facilities separate the entrances for emergency vehicles from the delivery door for people who are driven to emergency rooms by friends. or family members, or who drive themselves, to improve treatment and safety for patients.
Individual entrances to emergency rooms become “highly congested, chaotic, and simply unsafe. A fundamental change in ED design began to manifest separate entrances for the two types of traffic,” wrote James W. Harrell, an architect. specializing in health care colleges for GBBN Architects with offices in the US and China, and founder of the American College of Healthcare Architects, at Asian Hospital and Health Care Management. He recommends separate entrances that “must begin upon arrival on campus and continue at each entrance,” with only the entrance for outpatients, those arriving in private vehicles, marked. 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 Healthcare Security & Safety, in January. that “we have been using bollards and they have had a residual effect on the protection of the walls and the entry points to the facilities themselves. We have had great success, even at ambulance or ambulatory entry, with bollards, ensuring that we do not we would allow certain levels of penetration. That has become a fairly common safeguard for organizations, especially those that have done some kind of renovation or new construction. “
