7 fire safety considerations for your care service

A bit about the speaker…

Mick Feather is our Care Business Manager, and lives and breathes all things care-related across Citation. Mick joined us after spending four years as a Care Quality Commission Inspector – during this time, he trained-up 600 CQC inspectors, so you can be certain he knows what he’s talking about.

How to reduce your risks

As you already know, fires not only impact residents and employees, but they can put care homes out of business too. We’re sure we don’t need to tell you how important it is to safeguard your care home from fires, instead, we’re here to strip back exactly how you can reduce any risks within your premises.

In June 2017, the Chief Executive of the CQC sent a letter to all care providers asking them to review their fire safety processes, carry out a fire risk assessment, and reiterated that they’ll continue to assess fire safety during inspections.

If you’re a registered manager, here are seven specific considerations you should question yourself on:

1. Do you have adequate safety signs and are all of your fire exits clear of obstruction?

2. Are all of your hazardous and flammable chemicals correctly stored and locked away? Wrong storage isn’t only a danger to residents, but it can have an enormous and devastating impact on the spread of fire too.

3. Do you regularly check your fire alarm systems and firefighting equipment?

4. Does your care home have fire blankets, fire extinguishers and evacuation chairs and sledges? If so, have your employees been trained to use them?

5. Have all your employees been trained on fire safety, and are they all fully aware of their responsibilities in the event of a fire?

6. Do you regularly complete part or full evacuations of the building to make sure the measures you’ve put in place work in practice? Do you do them during the night as well as during the day? When you do this, remember to record details of what happened, and whether or not aspects of the evacuation could be improved.

Last but not least…

7. Have you completed person-centred Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (otherwise known as PEEPs) for each of the residents in your care? And have you considered how residents with dementia, learning disabilities or mental health issues might react to a fire evacuation? If so, what measures have you put in place to ensure your employees can deal with people’s behaviour in the event of a fire?

How we can help you

Remember, your fire risk assessment should be a living document that you regularly revisit. For help with anything fire safety or risk assessment-related, give our experienced experts a call on 0345 844 1111 or get in touch online.