ABSTRACT
The Fire Safety Evaluation System (FSES) for Health Care Facilities was the first of a series of FSES documents covering a variety of types of occupancies including apartment buildings, prisons and jails, office and laboratory buildings, overnight accommodations in National Parks, and board and care facilities. It provided a recognized means of developing alternative approaches to determine compliance with the code in that and later editions of the Life Safety Code. The FSES is a grading system designed to determine the overall level of fire safety of an existing or proposed facility in comparison with a hypothetical facility that exactly matched each requirement of the Life Safety Code. The FSES's have been adopted into building codes and similar regulations and have been institutionalized by the establishment of a special technical committee of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) charged with the responsibility for Alternative Methods for Life Safety in Buildings.
