Security bollards to protect hospitals against vehicles ramming buildings are becoming increasingly important to ensure safety and prevent costly damage to buildings and security equipment, and hospital architectural experts recommend separating emergency vehicles from other traffic at emergency entrances. The recent attempted car bombing by a parked car in Times Square in New York City 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 rising costs for property damage, including metal detection and other entrance security measures considered vital in many hospitals today, are additional factors in security planning. hospitable.

Security bollards are an inexpensive way to prevent ramming and keep vehicles a safe distance from structures. Security bollards are usually steel poles embedded in the ground with concrete. After 9/11, the US Department of State developed what it calls a K-rating system, which calculates the strength of bollards based on the size and speed of a vehicle that might be driven into a building. . 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, instead of a bunker at the 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 entrances for emergency vehicles from the drop-off door for people being driven to emergency rooms by friends or relatives, or who drive themselves, to improve treatment and care. safety for patients.

Individual ER entrances become “highly congested, chaotic, and simply unsafe. The fundamental change in the ED’s 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 by private vehicle. Bollards are frequently used to separate the 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 and Protection. , in January that “we have been using bollards and they have had a residual effect in protecting the walls and the actual entry points into the facility itself. We have had great success, including at the ambulance or ambulatory entrance, with bollards, making sure that we wouldn’t allow certain levels of penetration. That’s become a pretty common safeguard for organizations, especially those that have done some kind of renovation or new construction.”