Fire in the patient-care facility : rehearsal for survival. (1970s)

This training film uses testimony from a real nursing-home fire to argue that even “prepared” facilities can fail when the first minute is mishandled, especially at night with reduced staffing. It reframes fire response around the people most likely to discover a patient-area fire—nurses and frontline patient-care staff—and presents a rehearsal-style format: viewers are shown staged emergencies, asked to decide what to do, then shown the safest, fastest course of action. Through scenarios like a wastebasket fire, a bed fire, and a rapidly growing room fire, it teaches “first-aid firefighting” with improvised tools (blankets, sheets, towels, water), stresses immediate patient protection before anything else, and emphasizes containment (closing doors, checking heat before reentry, sealing door gaps) and rapid communication (sounding the alarm to bring help). It also highlights complications unique to healthcare—smoke and toxic gases, multiple patients, and medical devices like IVs and oxygen—insisting these become secondary to removing patients from life-threatening smoke and flame. The film concludes with a clear sequence of priorities: remove the patient from immediate danger, communicate/raise the alarm, then attempt limited firefighting, followed by progressive patient movement from emergency removal to staging behind fire doors, with full evacuation treated as a last resort.