Estimating Occupants in a Medical Office Building

Craig Pryde

Principal

ppk architects

LEEDuser Basic Member

0 thumbs up

November 5, 2013

I am trying to estimate the occupant load for table PIf3-4. Our project will have visitors and patients in addition to staff. I have consulted with the proposed tenants and compared the new space with other facilities that they operate in order to determine the anticipated amount of patients. Am I correct in assuming the number of patients should represent the cumulative amount for the day and not the amount of patients at any one time during the day? if so this would mean that there is not correlation between Occupant loads for LEED and Building code requirements for Occupant loads - correct? Any insight here would be greatly appreciated.

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Susan Walter

HDR

LEEDuser Expert

894 thumbs up

Wed, 11/06/2013 - 18:50

You will still want to estimate your visitor and patient load over the 8 hour time period and no, LEED occupancy and code occupant loads are very different. My recommendation is to look back at your programming load and see what the throughput is on the suite to determine the capacity of each suite is for patients. How long is the average patient in the suite (waiting, exam, checkout)? Then ask how many patients bring a support person or two. Finally, remember that you will be averaging this over 8 hours and that they will not schedule a full patient load at the beginning and end of the day plus lunch. The type of practice heavily influences the occupancy.