More than half of care homes fail fire safety inspection

[Waterbaby]

"The majority of care homes inspected in a major fire safety audit failed basic checks, it has emerged, triggering concerns that the lives of elderly people are being put at risk.

Of the 177 homes inspected by the London Fire Brigade (LFB), 101 – 57% – were issued with a formal notification instructing them to address safety concerns.

The brigade said it believed the findings would be repeated if similar inspections were carried out across the country."

Jamie Doward (Sun 3 Feb 2019) : https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... to-elderly


https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/media/34 ... rigade.pdf

WB

[Messy]

That is a disappointing figure, but I wonder if we need t be a bit careful about how this news is being spun. OK it could be an outrageous failing by the sector or maybe not. 45% of premises had an an unsuitable or insufficiently comprehensive fire risk assessment(FRA). That may well be a bit chunk of the total sample so will influence the LFB's press release somewhat. So lets consider:

1) Firstly, the 45% did have a FRA. In my experience, that is more than the average business sector where a huge amount of businesses haven't even got one. To be fair, not having a FRA is a compliance issue of course, but doesn't directly place anyone at risk in the same way as poor emergency lighting or poorly maintained extinguishers

2) Then what does this term "unsuitable or insufficiently comprehensive' mean? I know a number of fire enforcement authorities are now pushing for responsible persons to compile a Fire Safety Policy, although there is no requirement under the Fire Safety Order. Those enforcement authorities are pushing Fire Safety Polices under article 11 of the Fire Safety Order that says the responsible persons should have systems in place "for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of the preventive and protective measures." - and in some circumstances, these measures must be recorded.

In the past, as long as these measures where recorded in the FRA, everyone was happy. But the big bullies in some Enforcing authorities are now making the law up as they go along and insisting on Policy which may duplicate was has already been recorded.

3) Fire doors comes up a lot when the Inspectors turn up. But are they being realistic? The last audit on our estate was in a huge building. It was carried out by a very competent Inspecting Officer. I used to do his job and was very impressed. During his tour of the massive 130,000m2 building, he remarked that out of the hundreds of fire doors we had passed through or by, only 3 were found to be defective - and all of those were the fact they didn't quite close tightly.

He commended our routines and system for checking the fire doors as being first class........... and then wrote it up as a failure on an informal notice. What a pillock! This busy and old building will never have 100% of its fire doors working 100% well on 100% of all occasions. I fear sometimes the Inspecting Officers do not consider the real world workings of a building



One area where I do agree there are issues in care homes is staff numbers and competence of staff. The only way to make money in this sector is to keep overheads down. So staff numbers at night can often not be sufficient to evacuate residents, and poor pay leads to high turnover of staff. It also attract staff whose English language skills are not great. Employers tend to use cheaper off the shelf e-learning fire packages to cope with the turnover

I really do think a standard needs to be made where if a home cannot reach the criteria need to enable an evacuation to take place at night, they must install sprinklers to slow fire spread. No other building would be allowed to have a system where there are insufficient staff to evacuate often heavily sedated residents

Maybe this is where enforcement authorities should be concentrating