Ron Ball leads us through the shifting regulatory landscape for bulk medical gas systems.
The industry consensus standards and regulatory requirements regarding hospital bulk medical gas system installation and maintenance have been continuously evolving over the last few years. Over the same period we have seen state and local regulatory officials become more interested in the training and certification of personnel performing work on these systems. This article will look at how this regulatory landscape is changing and the tools available to firms to stay abreast of those changes.
Until recently the full set of requirements for designing, installing, servicing, and maintaining a healthcare facility bulk medical gas system was contained within the National Fire Protection Association standard, NFPA 99, and included specifications governing where the bulk medical oxygen tanks could be placed, and clearances to things ranging from doors and windows to fuel oil tanks and non-ambulatory patients. However, NFPA 99 only pertained to medical installations. Industrial installations of the same gas were governed under a different set of NFPA standards, namely NFPA 50 (oxygen). Other standards, such as NFPA 50A & NFPA 50B covered hydrogen installations.
To minimize potential duplication and conflicting requirements, NFPA in 2002 proposed to consolidate all gas requirements in a new document – NFPA 55. This single document would then house the regulatory requirements for all gas system installations. When NFPA 55 – 2005 was released it also contained a significant paradigm shift in the thinking about the role the document would play. All previous versions were written as standards, to then be adopted by states, either fully or in part, depending on the state. Often states would adopt sections of NFPA standards into their existing codes, and in other locales the state code would cite the NFPA standard, in effect making the standard a code. In contrast, the new NFPA 55 publication entitled Compressed Gases and Cryogenic Fluids issued in 2005 has been written as a model code. This document is intended to be adopted in full by state and local authorities. In theory this should hopefully start to rectify the patchwork approach to code implementation across the 50 states that exist today, at least for gases.
In NFPA 55 some of the gases such as oxygen and hydrogen have chapters that cover the hazard properties and issues specific to those gases. Common hazards for cryogenic and / or compressed gases are lumped into sections of the code all together. This grouping process has caused some unintended problems. For example, NFPA 55 can be interpreted as requiring no smoking signs and spill aprons for inert gases like Nitrogen and Argon, even though this was not the intent of the code writers. The NFPA 55 committee is expected to make some corrections to the document in the 2013 edition to correct these unintended issues.
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