Plumbing fixture count for emergency room

[Chunky Salsa]

Hi all,

I am with a design firm working on a renovation project for an existing hospital. We are going to be doing a major renovation to the emergency department and I am having trouble applying plumbing fixture requirements. Using vanilla IBC 2018 Chapter 29.

The institutional category is broken down into subcategories (detention not applicable here)
1. Custodial care facilities
2. Medical care recipients in hospitals and nursing homes
3. Employees in hospitals and nursing homes
4. Visitors in hospitals and nursing homes

#2 sounds right, but the W/C requirement is simply one-per-room. That doesn't make sense in an emergency room setting. It is clearly for hospital inpatients. Should I use custodial care which is 1/10 occupants?

#3 for employees is also confusing to me. All the occupancy calculations in the code are simply based on square footage. I can go to the hospital Owner and see what their planned staffing is for the area, but there is no place I can find in the plumbing portion of the code which says that is OK. Assuming it is, would the staff count be subtracted from the calculated occupant load for the department in order to figure out the visitor count?

I also looked in the 2012 UPC which I happened to have a copy of. It breaks things down differently:
1. hospitals and nursing homes - individual rooms and ward room
1a. 1 per room
1b. 1 per 8 patients
2. hospital waiting or visitor rooms - 1 per room
3. Employee use - (complicated, based on occ load)

So I guess in the UPC an emergency room would be considered a "ward room"?

Any advice on the topic would be appreciated.

 

[RLGA]

I would use #4. Other than employees, all persons in an emergency room are visitors until they are admitted. I would use the occupant loads for all staff-only areas and the employee fixture ratio (#3) to determine the employee fixture count, and then use the occupant loads for all the public areas, including treatment areas, and the visitor fixture ratio (#4) to determine the visitor fixture count.

 

[steveray]

Is the waiting room an assembly use?....If you are using the IEBC, you are not likely to have to add any......Ask the client their use of space and provide that as long as it is not a decrease...

 

[Chunky Salsa]

Thank you for the replies.

Ron, thanks for the advice. I had not thought to consider emergency room "patients" as visitors, but after thinking about it that does make sense. I will run that suggestion up the flagpole so-to-speak.

Steve, the project includes both addition and renovation, so without getting into the details we need to calculate required fixtures for the entire ED. We are treating the waiting room as an assembly space per chapter 10 to get the correct occupant load, but the overall occupancy is still I-2.

 

[ITNASOCRA]

I am working in a similar condition at the moment, and per IBC 2018 The "Business" classification provides for Ambulatory care, which can capture ED/ER patient areas as well (albeit the ratio is not as favorable as using the Visitors sub-class in Institutional).

What did you end up doing for this?

 

[Joe.B]

Steve, the project includes both addition and renovation, so without getting into the details we need to calculate required fixtures for the entire ED. We are treating the waiting room as an assembly space per chapter 10 to get the correct occupant load, but the overall occupancy is still I-2.

And (from my limited experience) CA doesn't really use the Existing Building Code the way many states do.

 

[mark handler]

Hi all,

I am with a design firm working on a renovation project for an existing hospital. We are going to be doing a major renovation to the emergency department and I am having trouble applying plumbing fixture requirements. Using vanilla IBC 2018 Chapter 29.

The institutional category is broken down into subcategories (detention not applicable here)
1. Custodial care facilities
2. Medical care recipients in hospitals and nursing homes
3. Employees in hospitals and nursing homes
4. Visitors in hospitals and nursing homes

#2 sounds right, but the W/C requirement is simply one-per-room. That doesn't make sense in an emergency room setting. It is clearly for hospital inpatients. Should I use custodial care which is 1/10 occupants?

#3 for employees is also confusing to me. All the occupancy calculations in the code are simply based on square footage. I can go to the hospital Owner and see what their planned staffing is for the area, but there is no place I can find in the plumbing portion of the code which says that is OK. Assuming it is, would the staff count be subtracted from the calculated occupant load for the department in order to figure out the visitor count?

I also looked in the 2012 UPC which I happened to have a copy of. It breaks things down differently:
1. hospitals and nursing homes - individual rooms and ward room
1a. 1 per room
1b. 1 per 8 patients
2. hospital waiting or visitor rooms - 1 per room
3. Employee use - (complicated, based on occ load)

So I guess in the UPC an emergency room would be considered a "ward room"?

Any advice on the topic would be appreciated.

The Hospital work that I have done, we based it off of CPC TABLE 422.1, I-4 Institutional occupancy (any age that receives care for less than 24 hours)
Waiting room based on number of seats
Toilet: 1: 1-15, 2: 16-35, 3: 36-55
LAVATORIES 1 per 40


Note: if single occupant, they must be All Gender units
the restrooms in the back need to be separated from those in the actual "Waiting Room"