Hospital buildings are a form of public building, and the hospital clean operating department is a functional component within a hospital building. There are various ways to construct the buildings of a hospital clean operating department: some are built jointly with other functional buildings of the hospital, while others are built independently, depending on the hospital's conditions and scale. Whether built jointly or independently, and whether it is a single-story, multi-story, or high-rise building, the fire protection design of the building—including the fire compartments within the building, the building height boundary between the high-rise and multi-story classifications, the fire resistance classification of the building, and the corresponding fire resistance limit requirements for building components—must first comply with the relevant requirements of national standards for the fire protection design of comprehensive civil buildings [such as the national standards Code for Fire Protection Design of Buildings (GBJ16-87) and Code for Fire Protection Design of High-rise Civil Buildings (GB50045-95)]. As part of the hospital's functional buildings, it should also comply with the provisions of the national industry standard Code for Design of General Hospital (JGJ49-88). Therefore, in addition to complying with the provisions of this guide, the fire protection design of the clean operating department building should also comply with the provisions of current national standards such as the Code for Fire Protection Design of Buildings, the Code for Fire Protection Design of High-rise Civil Buildings, and the Code for Design of General Hospital.

Fire safety of buildings is a comprehensive systematic project. In accordance with the fire protection policy of "prevention first, combining prevention with firefighting", the fire safety design of a building should be comprehensively determined based on factors such as the occurrence and development patterns of building fires and their hazards, human behavioral characteristics and external rescue capabilities, the city's fire protection facilities, and regional cultural, climatic, environmental, and economic conditions.

Generally, the hazards brought by building fires include: the threat of fire or high-temperature toxic smoke to the life safety and evacuation behavior of people inside the building or who need to enter the building; the threat of flames or high temperatures to the structural load-bearing capacity; the threat of fire spreading beyond a certain permissible level to adjacent fire compartments or other buildings, as well as the adverse impact of firefighting operations on the building itself and the surrounding environment; and the economic losses suffered from property inside the building or from production interruptions caused by the fire. The national standards Code for Fire Protection Design of Buildings and Code for Fire Protection Design of High-rise Civil Buildings provide principled provisions for building fire protection design in three aspects: the passive fire protection system of buildings formed by measures such as internal fire compartments and external fire separation distances, and the control of fire loads such as combustibles within buildings; the active fire protection system of buildings, including firefighting facilities, fire alarm facilities, and smoke control and exhaust facilities inside and outside buildings; and the personnel safe evacuation system composed of evacuation distance control, safety exits, refuge floors, and the installation of emergency evacuation signage and lighting devices. The Code for Design of General Hospital, taking into account the characteristics of general hospitals, further supplements and refines these provisions in its "Fire Protection" chapter on the basis of the above two national standards and other national standards. The Architectural Technical Code for Hospital Clean Operating Department makes more targeted and specific requirements based on the functional needs and architectural characteristics of the clean operating department.

There are mainly two different approaches to building fire protection: one is to pursue the avoidance or reduction of fire outbreaks through rational design and management, and once a fire breaks out, to limit it as much as possible within a relatively small fire-separated space; the other is how to take measures to control and extinguish the fire when a fire occurs in the building, striving to extinguish the fire in its early development stage, pursuing early-stage firefighting or fire control. The passive fire protection system of buildings is mainly based on the basic principles of combustion, taking measures to prevent the generation of combustion conditions or to weaken the development of combustion conditions and to prevent the spread of fire, that is, controlling the fire load density within the building, improving the fire resistance rating of the building and the combustion performance of materials, controlling and eliminating ignition sources, and adopting separation measures to prevent fire spread. The active fire protection system of buildings mainly takes measures to detect fires early, destroy the already-formed combustion conditions, and terminate the chain reaction of combustion, so as to extinguish the fire or control it within a certain range and reduce fire hazards; this is mainly achieved through the installation of automatic fire alarm systems, building firefighting facilities, and smoke control and exhaust systems.