Not LOLER but given the potential risk of injury in their use I would suggest that yearly maintenance inspection would be prudent.

Having been digging through the LOLER Regs this week I noticed that there is a section that relates to lifting people (Section 5).

Not sure if there's some kind of caveat that states evac chairs don't fall under LOLER but to my mind they are an appliance that is used for lifting a 'load' (definition includes a person).

I'm open to being corrected as the Regs state;
Interpretation:
“lifting equipment” means work equipment for lifting or lowering loads and includes its attachments used for anchoring, fixing or supporting it;
“lifting operation” has the meaning given in regulation 8(2);
“load” includes a person;
“work equipment” means any machinery, appliance, apparatus, tool or installation for use at work (whether exclusively or not).

And;

'Reg 8 (2) In this regulation “lifting operation” means an operation concerned with the lifting or lowering of a load.'

Open to challenge on this as my understanding may be a little 'off'.

LOLER was written to stop suspended stuff falling on people and supended people falling themselves.

Anything else is too wide a translation of the word 'lifting'. Otherwise, crowbars would be lifting equipment.

People need to get the idea out of their head that PUWER is LOLER's poorer cousin, it isn't. The provisions of PUWER are perfectly adequate if the risks have been properly assessed and sufficient controls put in place. including inspection and maintanence.

Wow! You need 55 of these? Really? You're going to need a lot of trained people too then!

I think Hospitalboy's username might be a clue why so many are required!!

Bob, the 'by some other means' aspect to the disabled evacuation policy you refer to, do you mean there was another method, or staff would simply improvise on the day?

No criticism intended mate, I am just getting my head around your system.

HI Messyshaw, I just picked up on your response to my posting. The environment I work is was not a hospital type workplace but an office covering several floors with three lifts and three fire escape routes. There were no disabled people employed at the time but we did have disabled visitors. Evacuation was not a problem for us so we chose not to provide evac chairs as they required training and practice to use them safely. On the subject of hospitals I have visited our rather large hospital (with about 500 beds with some 25 wards) and have never seen any evac chairs let alone 55. Hospitals have very strict rules about compartmentation and generally have the benefit of close proximity to the fire service. What I was saying is it is horses for courses, where there are a large number of elderly or infirm patients I would argue more for a stricter code on fire prevention than having a large number of evac chairs.

I have just developed a system for a very large office building with several thousand occupants. It has 16 separate lift shafts - 6 of which are fire-fighting shafts with fire-fighting lifts.

The disabled evacuation strategy relies on the use of one or more of the 6 fire-fighting lifts as evacuation lift(s). In the unlikely event that all six lifts are defective (bearing in mind, they have all got two independent power supplies) then there will be six evacuation chairs (one for each fire-fighting shaft) as a last resort.

This the easy bit. The most difficult part was training nearly 200 staff members. Then there was changes to the fire detection software (to ensure the FF lifts do not open on a floor where a fire has been detected), adding dozens of signs - and before all of that was possible - convincing management this was a viable option to cover their legislative duties.