I am not sure if you are aware of this but in case you work within elderly services thought I would post.

A recent incident occurred where, during an electrical storm, the hospital power supply was momentarily interrupted causing fire doors held open on magnetic detents to be released. The closing doors struck an elderly patient as they passed through the doors, causing them to fall, and sustain a serious head injury, which ultimately contributed to their death two weeks later.
The fire doors were a set of double swing cross-corridor doors with floor mounted closing devices. The door self-closing device was compliant with the relevant British Standard, BS EN 1154, and the doors functioned as intended, albeit at the faster end of the standard, with the resultant consequence.

The door closed within the 3 seconds but you may need to complete a survey of the doors and complete a risk assessment.

If you already knew my apologise.


If you go to the NHS CAS Alerts there is furter information.

I've only just started working with the ederly so this is the first. But thanks adds a bit more weight if I meet opposition, but i'm sure i won't.

Going to start a survey on Monday and get them changed so they slow down. I have raised this once before but only in relation to a door that closed to fast and only that door.

If the door closed within 3 seconds someone should be held liable

The BSEN recommendation is 3-7 seconds this would be short

Slightly off-topic, but in the same vein. You might like to check that the force needed to open any fire exits does not exceed the Standard.

I once found a fire exit that you had to take a run at to get the push bar to operate. Since it was in a room that was hired out to wedding parties I got something done about it sharpish.

An easy way to measure the force is to use bathroom scales pressed against the opening mechanism.

We had a similar situation a couple of years ago. Now our older persons team do have chats regularly with residents on fire, when it is mentioned - if the fire alarms sounds the doors will close automatically, we have placed signage on each door and we have slowed the doors progress to accommodate the frailty and speed of residents.
We have also looked at assistance with opening fire-doors having closers, which are sometimes too heavy for our residents to open, the unit used to open the door is battery operated, so as not to fail in an electrical outage and the motor is kept charged by the inertia of opening the door

It is difficult; one obvious solution would be sensor equipped powered doors, but that's very expensive.

The best way of delaing with this is to reduce the exposure. Eliminate (as far as possible) unwanted alarms by getting the right detectors in the right places and so on. Make sure, when you test the alarms or have a drill that there are enough staff to keep people safe. Then you only have to worry about actual fires, and for this, yes, look at the speed of closure, minimise the force of closure and so on.

It is not acceptable, in my view, for anybody to be killed or seriously injured because of a fire drill or alarm test. The purpose of drills and tests is to save life. To cause a death in a drill is like fighting for peace. Real fires are a different matter of course,

John

Our residents are no different - it is why we keep plugging away at this and our stay put policies, hopefully those suffering with the dementia will respond as we need them to. It is a thankless task and time consuming but in out view a necessity.