Posted By Gavin Gibson Gerry There are 2 basic issues here - risks to the person in the wheelchair and risks to others. During an evacuation, whether a drill or real, carrying somebody diownstairs with an evac chair poses a manual handling risk to the lifters, a fall could effectively blosk the stairwell and injure people, and it would impede the exit of others. You could either insist on wheelchair staff / visitors being restricted to the ground floor only, have any lifts uprated to being fireproof and hence available for use (very expensive), or create safe havens at the tops of stairs. a safe haven is simply an area that has at least 2 sets of firedoors between it and any potential fire. Naturally you would need to ensure that the wheelchair user was left accompanied in the safe haven by another member of staff, that the firebirgade were informed immediately of their location and ideally that the people in the haven had access to some form of communication - possibly a mobile phone. Best bet is to talk to the brigade and your insurers and get their advice.

Posted By Gerry Mcaleney Hi , Thanks to you both Gavin and Martin your suggestions will be followed up and i will consult the the wheelchair user and seek advice from someone within the fire and rescue service...Gerry

Posted By Ken Taylor Whilst the use of refuges ('safe havens') will 'buy time', the fire authorities now take the view that the employer must have a plan for evacuating everyone including wheelchair users. This should be taken into account as part of the fire risk assessment. I find this far from satisfactory - having been trained in the days when the system was to leave it to the fire brigade. Whilst the DDA gives a right of access to non-ambulant disabled persons unless the discrimination of refused access is reasonable, the Building Regulations have not 'kept up' and so there isn't any requirement for evacuation lifts even for new-build (and so designers are often not installing them on cost grounds). So, whilst I have no doubt that the fire brigade will continue to rescue wheelchair users from refuges, employers and persons in control of buildings will have to have plans that say that they will achieve this themselves whether it be by Evac-chairs, in users own wheelchairs (as suggested as the usually-preferred option in the BS) or by other means - or else, regrettably, argue for reasonable discrimination and confine some persons to the ground floor.