Hi

I work in a hospital and since a recent incident we are reviewing how quickly we could release a trapped person from a lift; obviously with a very sick patient time is essential. Currently we call out the lift maintenance enegineers but this can take an hour or even more has anyone trained in house staff to assist with this?

Hi Veronica,

My last employer has care homes for people with degenerative neurological conditions and hospices, many of which have lifts. Yes, we did train staff to perform lift release, but to be honest, always with reservations and a certain amount of fear in our hearts! Lifts have numerous safety devices to prevent very nasty, potentially fatal injuries. Manual release involves systematically defeating most of these devices, and therefore the risk of it all going wrong is very real. Staff were very aware of this (we didn't make a point of telling them in too much detail but they worked it out themselves) and in some places flatly refused to release the lifts.

We ended up with a risk based approach; just because somebody is stuck in a lift for an hour doesn't automatically mean they are at risk, in some cases it will be safer to wait for the engineer. If people need medications, or are in some other situation where there is a real risk to their safety, then manually release the lift.

You should also go back to your SLA with the lift engineers and see if you can get the call-out time down. The engineers know what they are doing; your staff will have had a short training session and won't get much practice, it could all go very badly wrong,

John