Queen's Medical Centre

Queen’s Medical Centre campus is part of the fourth largest acute teaching trust in the United Kingdom and the largest combined teaching, research and treatment hospital in Europe. This trust employs more than 12,000 people and offers 964 beds for its patients. Internationally renowned as a centre of excellence in patient care, teaching and research – it provides a wide range of general and specialist services for anyone in need of care. The Queen’s Medical Centre campus was the first purpose built teaching hospital in the UK. It is one of two main campuses, which make up the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and also includes the University of Nottingham’s Medical School.

Pre-existing situation & UTCFS’s role

On such a large and complex site, fire protection for patients, visitors and employees was a critical requirement. With thousands of people continually present on site, the fire detection and alarm facilities needed to provide pinpoint accuracy of the location of any potential fire condition. Among the most important requirements of the project were system reliability for large scale projects, sophisticated alarm and evacuation management programmes and flexibility for remotely disabling any part of the sensing system for building maintenance purposes. In addition to local codes, the installation had to fully meet the UK hospital fire detection and alarm system standards. As well as providing stand-alone fire detection, the system needed to be fully interfaced with the hospital building management equipment.

UTCFS’s solution

In order to provide a fast and reliable response to any fire condition in such an extensive building, UTCFS installed its ZP3 fire detection system based on four ring networks all connected by a central communications loop. A total of 94 control panels supported by 150 remote display units cover the entire hospital and control over 35,000 sensing devices, each individually interrogated by the control system every two seconds. Over 10,000 alarm sounders and 5,000 other addressable devices are also carried on the main wiring loops. The detection system is controlled from five Maestro alarm management and graphic display stations, where fire and fault conditions can be located and tracked on a series of building maps – providing full information down to the level of any individual sensor. In general, sensors are easily serviced on a sensor-by-sensor basis as devices approaching near maintenance conditions are highlighted.