If you’re a care home owner, manager, or operator, you need to ensure you’re up to scratch with the risks and legislation related to fire safety in your building.
Having this knowledge gives you the best chance of:
- Protecting your home’s residents and staff
- Minimising potential damage from fire
- Avoiding heavy fines or jail time
- Ensuring business continuity
Our article focuses on the fire risks within residential care homes and how you can manage these risks.
In this article
Fire safety risks within care homes
Why fire risk assessments are essential for care homes
The role of a Responsible Person in a care home
The fire safety legislation for care homes
How care home owners and managers can remain compliant
Fire safety risks within care homes
This section will focus on the inherent risks within care homes and the potential repercussions of not addressing these risks in a timely manner.
Let’s start with care home residents. These are typically elderly people — within the 65 years and over care home population, in England and Wales 56.4% of residents were aged 85 years and over.
This statistic represents a series of challenges in respect of fire safety. For example, people within this demographic cohort can have mobility issues, age-related hearing loss, dementia, and various mental health difficulties.
These factors may make it difficult for you to evacuate patients quickly in the event of a fire. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site has personal evacuation plans in place for those who require them.
To maximise evacuation efficiency, you may need to upgrade your home’s alarm systems. A system that omits a loud volume and flashing strobe light in the event of a fire will alert hard-of-hearing residents and act as a vital cue to leave the premises.
Then there are your members of staff to consider. You may have a large number of people working on-site, and in an emergency, they have to get themselves out as well as the residents.
Depending on the nature of their employment, these members of staff may not be familiar with the home’s evacuation procedures and exit routes, and this lack of familiarity can slow down response times.
As this section illustrates, there’s a lot for you to consider in how you mitigate risk and approach evacuation. That’s why it’s essential to reach out to a fire safety specialist to discuss evacuation strategies if you’re unsure of anything.
Other fire safety risks
The presence of mobility scooters within care homes poses several potential challenges in the event of fire:
- A mobility scooter can release large volumes of smoke, get very hot, and could even have a violent reaction and catch fire as it’s powered by lithium-ion batteries.
- A typical medium-sized mobility scooter is around 100cm high and 60cm long and weighs between 40kg and 60kg. If such an item is stored in a corridor, which is an escape route, it’s going to be difficult to move quickly. As such, this escape route could become impassable during a fire, placing residents and staff at heightened risk of serious injury or death.
Smoking is another factor to consider. Many elderly people are smokers, and you’re not going to stop them from having a cigarette, particularly in the comfort of their own homes.
In supported accommodation or a retirement village, for example, residents have autonomy in terms of their lifestyle choices. It’s not as straightforward as implementing a no-smoking policy and expecting that to stick.
As such, you need to work alongside a risk assessor who understands how your building is used. Is it a conventional care home, residential care home, supported accommodation, or retirement village? Or is it none of these? The right guidance has to be applied to the right environment.
There’s also the obvious fact that a care home is sleeping accommodation, which makes it harder to react quickly in the event of fire, irrespective of residents’ hearing or mobility issues.
This fact emphasises why every part of your fire safety operation needs to be watertight, whether it’s compartmentation, your fire doors, or general fire safety procedures.
We know from first-hand experience that care homes are complex, often large sites. Some care homes can be small, but some can house more than 100 residents. As such, they require not only complex, bespoke safety measures but also extensive staff training (which we’ll explore in more detail further down).
The final point we’ll make here — and we alluded to this above — is around footfall in care homes. You don’t just need to consider the wellbeing of residents or staff; you need to think about the care home users in general. For instance, visiting family members, contractors, visiting health practitioners, etc…
All manner of people will set foot in your building, and they need to be factored into any passive fire protection measures you implement for your home.
These are just some examples of the common risks. You can read more about these in the section below titled ‘What a care home fire risk assessment looks at’.
Why fire risk assessments are essential for care homes
A fire risk assessment is a legally required document which ensures that a premises and its occupants are safe from fire.
The assessor will visit your premises and look for anything on-site that could pose a risk to the occupants or building.
They will also review maintenance records and policies, procedures, servicing records, and training records to ensure the building management is correct.
A fire risk assessment is designed to provide a holistic overview of building safety and identify any risks that need to be addressed in more detail to mitigate or remove the risk entirely.
What a care home fire risk assessment looks at
Among other things, a fire risk assessment for care homes will focus on:
- Policies and procedures
- The condition of the building
- Personal needs for evacuation
- How the building is actually used — i.e., is it used as a professional cooking facility; are residents allowed to smoke (as touched on above)?
- The level of staff training provided to staff
The role of a Responsible Person in a care home
As per The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (FSO), a Responsible Person must ensure the premises and its occupants are safe from fire. They can do this by enlisting the help of specialist fire risk assessors.
Under Article 3 of the FSO, there are three possible categories of Responsible Person:
- An employer — either an individual or a company with control (to any extent) of a building that is a workplace.
- A person in control of the premises.
- The owner.
The fire safety legislation for care homes
This guide, which has been published by the Secretary of State under Article 50 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (FSO), is what a fire risk assessor will follow when assessing your building.
How care home owners and managers can remain compliant with fire safety legislation
You need to work with your fire risk assessor to understand the risks, legislation, and formal guidance that apply to your premises.
Having a strong grasp of the above will, in turn, help you understand how you can best implement this guidance.
All staff in your care home should have basic fire safety awareness training. This training should cover the specific duties their role encompasses, such as evacuating residents with specific needs. It should also outline the evacuation plans, which should take into consideration the various mitigating factors within care homes, such as resident immobility.
Fire marshals typically receive more training so that they can help in an evacuation situation. Your staff may receive fire marshall training once every three years. However, it may be appropriate for them to be trained once a year with additional detail that covers more about their specific role.
Your business needs to decide what’s appropriate and how often your staff receive this training.
As another example, you may need six fire wardens for every hundred people, or you may decide you need 20 or 30 wardens.
The exact number depends on your home’s configuration, among other things. Housing 100 people in a three-storey premises is very different to housing 100 people in a one-storey premises, for instance.
Some final tips
- Take fire safety seriously. This point should be self-explanatory, but we can’t stress it enough. If you’re responsible for fire safety, understand your role and act accordingly. Taking fire safety seriously could mean enrolling on further training, plugging some knowledge gaps, or whistleblowing.
- Having an active interest in fire safety and employing a continuous improvement mindset is vital when you manage or operate a care home.
- Work with your local fire service, fire risk assessor, and any relevant contractors you may employ to assist with fire safety.
- Focus on prevention and removing risk rather than resorting to reactive measures. Focusing on passive fire protection (i.e., ensuring signage and emergency lighting is adequate and that you don’t fall behind on planned maintenance) is just as important as active fire elements.
- Care home managers move on, and their successors may not possess the same knowledge of fire safety. It’s important to be mindful of this and have a succession plan in place.
Don’t leave your care home unprepared for fire
This is the concluding section of our article. But before we sign off, we want to share a short story about a UK care home we visited.
This care home used upstairs rooms as sleeping accommodation for staff and just threw mattresses on the floor.
The building was riddled with compartmentation issues, policies weren’t being implemented, and there was lots of paperwork missing.
We ended up having to report this care home to the fire service. We’ve had to report many businesses for various noncompliance failings. When the risk to life is so high, we’ve got to draw attention to it.
If a fire had taken place at this care home, it’s unthinkable what this could have led to, taking the above information into account.
Fire safety should not be reactive — it should be proactive. It shouldn’t be a 999 call.
You know your care home needs to be prepared for the event of fire, so make sure you’re adequately prepared by reaching out to a specialist fire safety consultant.
We provide fire safety training and fire risk assessments for care homes, and our services are underpinned by decades of first-industry experience.
Make your care home fire-safe and gain complete peace of mind by calling us on 0151 665 0124 or email info@nwsolutions.co.uk.