I wonder what peoples thoughts are regarding compulsory fire safety training for all employees. Let me put this in context. We are a mental health facility and fire safety and extinguisher training is compulsory for all employees. I provide this training and I am competent to do so. My question is what value is there in training Doctors and Consultants in fire safety and extinguisher use?
My own opinion is to provide basic information e.g. Evacuation routes, alarm signals and activating alarms and to leave the doctors to manage the service users and triage. This can be done very briefly whereas fire safety training is quite comprehensive and takes nearly two hours which can be a problem.
The emergency evacuation and management of any situation is led by nursing as they are the constant within the hospital, and this works very well.
Would you support the full training of all employees or as I have suggested and how would you present this?
Kevin

Most organisations feel their main concern is to get staff out safely if there is a fire. Therefore they don’t regard fire-fighting training as a priority; they focus on simple things like evacuation.
In some facilities, such as yours possibly it could be that simply allowing staff to evacuate is not an option. There is an expectation that any fire would be fought by staff until the fire services arrive. This depends on things like the presence of vulnerable people in the facility or the effectiveness of the local fire services.
Whatever decision is taken, it must be a thought out decision based on the accepting the risks involved.

Note to self: spellcheck!

the training needed is relative to the risk present and I would not train people to use fire extinguishers unless the risk assessment indicated that it was a real need in that occupation in a specific circumstance noting that too many 'amateur' fire fighters have come unstuck in the past trying to fight fires and the law does not say that everybody should be trained to do every specific thing or use all specific kit