RiskUKAugust2017

FIA Technical Briefing
Fire Prevention in Care Homes:
What Strategies Should Be Considered?
Those who have been in the fire industry for
some time will remember the Rosepark
Care Home incident wherein 14 elderly
residents died at the facility in Scotland after a
fire broke out in a cupboard back in 2004.
If you think that’s long in the past, you only
need to filter through the News on the Fire
Industry Association’s website to find multiple
stories of care homes in breach of fire
regulations. Only recently, a care home in
Cheshire was fined £50,000 for two breaches.
All of this shows the severity of the need for
careful fire risk management and planning.
Let’s examine the problems of fitting out care
homes with the correct equipment and putting
in place the maintenance that’s required.
The responsibility to actually plan and
schedule the installation and maintenance of
any fire protection equipment lies solely with
the ‘Responsible Person’ as outlined in the
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
This is usually the care home itself. So, while
those contracted to the care home are not
necessarily in the immediate firing line (so to
speak) if something goes wrong, there’s a duty
upon technicians and contractors to follow
standards and Best Practice in order to ensure
that the highest possible levels of safety are
maintained and that the blame cannot be
shifted in the event of a fire.
It’s worth noting that a fire alarm contractor
was actually fined over £11,000 in 2016 for
failing to inform a care home owner of faults
within the system after the court decided the
contractor flouted fire safety legislation.
Main challenge posed
The main challenge with most care homes is
the inability of occupants to evacuate quickly.
Some residents may be bedridden while others
will take a significant amount of time and staff
support to enable their mobility. In addition,
even able-bodied residents may experience
significant confusion upon hearing an alarm
and have difficulty in finding building exits.
When added to commercial pressures on
staffing levels, it’s somewhat challenging to
ensure a care home could be evacuated fully
and safely in the event of a fire. Clearly, then,
the necessity to detect fires as quickly as
possible (and before they become too large to
deal with on a safe basis) plays an important
role in ensuring the safety of occupants.
Following the tragic events at Grenfell Tower in June, it seems
that there’s a renewed focus on fire safety issues.
Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster such as this to
rekindle public interest in the discipline. Naturally, this will
likely lead to an upsurge in new business, with fire
companies increasingly involved in new projects, system
updates and refurbishments of specific building types. Robert
Yates focuses on fire safety regimes for care homes
To this end, BS 5839 Part 1 recommends L1
(coverage throughout) fire detection in large
nursing homes, while many specifications for
smaller care homes will also specify L1 after the
appropriate risk assessment is conducted.
The Rosepark Care Home episode led to BS
5839 Part 1 making two important
recommendations. First, that nursing homes
with more than ten occupants should be
protected by addressable systems and, second,
that those homes should have an automatic
connection to the Fire Brigade.
The key advantage of addressability in a
system is in providing accurate information as
regards the point of detection. This can be
critical in reducing the time taken between
detection and the commencement of
firefighting either by staff using portable
extinguishers or by the Fire and Rescue Service
if the fire’s more significant in scale.
Connectivity to the Fire Brigade is also an
essential point. In the event of fire, members of
staff need to react quickly and may already be
Robert Yates:
Technical Manager at the Fire
Industry Association
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