Fire safety awareness among Malaysian Public Hospital

Abstract

This research focuses on assessing people’s awareness of fire safety practice in public hospitals in Malaysia. Raising awareness of fire safety practice is important to avoid delays in the fire evacuation process. Hospital users like patients, visitors, and medical staff should be familiar with the hospital building plan and escape routes, which intend to minimize the risk of casualties in the event of fire. However, poor evacuation design and design information, lack of promotion on the importance of fire safety practice among patients and visitors and poor knowledge on fire safety practicelead to the low level of awareness on fire safety practice. Therefore, there are three purposes of this study; to determine the level of awareness on fire safety practice among hospital users, to identify the significant differenceof level of awareness onfire safety procedure based on the hospital users socio-demographic and to propose improvement strategies in order to increase the level of awareness of hospital users. A total of 285 respondents, including hospital staff, patients and visitors were selected from six hospitals in peninsular Malaysia. The data were analysed using descriptive analysis and One Way Anova using SPSS software version 26. The result showed that, respondents from four hospitalsshow a moderate level of fire safety awareness, while only respondents from two other hospitals show a high level of fire safety awareness. A one-way Anova test did not reveal any significant difference statistically between the level of fire safety awarenessand the socio-demographic background. Based on the finding, several suggestions were recommended in order to raise the awareness on the fire safety practice in public hospitals such as, advocatingmini campaigns on fire safety practice at hospital level thru public outreach campaigns like public talk and fire safety awareness booth, improve fire safety awareness poster designs, conduct fire drill stimulation, create video case regarding the importance offire safety practice, educational fire safety practices throughbrochures, create effective fire safety advertisement, enhance safety awareness through sign board and much more.