Posted By J Knight Hi Folks, Does anybody have any experience of evaluating the effectiveness of fire responses, short of setting fire to a building and seeing what happens? I'll put this in context. We have a number of health and social care premises. We have spent the last twelve months looking at the physical fire-protection measures, using guidance from the NHS, and we think, as far as possible in buildings dating from as far back as the 12C we have got that bit taped. We have also looked at our response plans, but not in any thorough or systematic way. What we have so far therefore is a view that our planning needs revision, but we don't have any clear plans of what the revision will look like. Don't get me wrong, all our premises have fire response plans, and most of them were written with the active involvement of the local fire service. But we have noted that they are inconsistent, largely because fire services are local, and they don't necessarily meet the requirements of the RR(FS)O and the new DCLG guidance. As an example, the new guidance says that everyone in the premises should be able to evacuate 'without the help of the fire and rescue service'; this is a significant shift in emphasis. What we are doing is drawing up a protocol for evaluating our response plans; this should include in my view a requirement to reality test them. Again, this is something which hasn't always been done in the past for fear of disrupting patients and service users. So if anybody has any top tips or handy hints, or examples of protocols they have used in similar exercises, I would as usual be very grateful. It's not stuff about the RR(FS)O I need, or the guidance, its details and experience of revising response plans that I'm hoping for John

Posted By rjhills John, I have worked in a similar environment, done the same things assessed the risk to the vulnerable, and sorted out the alarms and security and fire alarm response. All our accom. units were linked to the local fire station, and I had close contact with the operational side, including their local Fire Safety Officer (Operations). We had numerous alarms, all of which without exception were within 10 minutes or less. Talk to the operational if you are having problems, as the fire servive is now being pushed from pillar to post by the govt changes being carried out which are working mainly against good local cover. I had no problems, and would recommend close with your local fire station to bring home the fact that you are a person, with a problem..not a voice on the telephone. Close cooperation workedfor me. Give it a try! Best of luck in a difficult situation.

Posted By J Knight Hi Folks, Thanks for the responses so far; as usual there are good ideas here, and useful pointers, John

Posted By J Knight Hi Ashley, We largely operate a horizontal evacuation process, but there are striking variations; for example, in some of our hospices designated nurses will stay with patients to offer aid and comfort (I know, I didn't write the procedure). Some of the neurological homes still rely on the fire service to rescue people, an approach which is expressly condemned in the new guidance. m One problem with that is, if our staff have to evacuate everybody, how will this work at night? Staffing levels at night are very low; having to retain staff just in case of a fire will increase costs to an unreasonable extent, John

Posted By Joe Doc I thought the need for us to evacuate premises had been with us since the Fire Precautions Regs. Immaterial of what it says in the RRO there is an acceptance surely that there is significant work involved in the evacuation of such premises and the requirement is for us to commence our evacuation plans (either full, partial , horizontal etc.) prior to the arrival of the rescue services. The early stages of our plans and our physical conditions are the important part to ensure folk are at least able to be moved away from an activated zone etc. I don't believe any of us would have enough staff to effect a full evacuation at night the resources needed would be too great. It is because of this we have spent a significant amount of cash creating new fire compartments with smaller numbers of rooms within them etc (i.e. no more than 7 bedrooms). It may be a sad fact but if a major incident did occur there are some circumstances where the exercise would be limiting the numbers exposed as we could not instruct our staff to work in danger in a compartment which contains a fire for example.

Posted By Joe Doc John, Apologies if you got the impression I was telling you how to suck eggs, not intended. If it's any consolation we until recently were getting conflicting advice from different commands of the same fire authority in relation to practice issues, so to hear of different interpretations between different authorities is no surprise as we know. I inherited a situation with lots of Unit Managers having 'arrangements' with the local fire station not to worry about evacuation as they will arrive blue lights et al and take care of everything! The local guys were well meaning but giving false hope and wrong advice and of course nothing was ever official, but individual managers wouldn't know or understand that they just look at the face value of things.