South Australian Country Fire Service Promotions Unit

Medical facilities exist in most CFS response areas, from small health clinics to large scale hospitals in metropolitan areas, through to nursing homes.

A Hospital by definition, is an institution whose primary function is to provide inpatient services, diagnostic and therapeutic, for a variety of medical conditions, both surgical and non-surgical. In addition, most hospitals provide some outpatient services, particularly emergency care.

This poses an additional risk than normal as these facilities contain a large number of people who may not be mobile, or severely limited in mobility and need assistance. In a case of a small rural hospital with 40 beds and an emergency unit, this poses a problem if an incident occurs.

CFS in these areas will perform drills to assist the hospital workers on the fastest and safest way of evacuating patients in the event of an incident and this also means other brigades are responded in to assist to not only combat the emergency, but also to assist the staff in removing all patients from harms way.