Unlike a regular home or the vast majority of all other businesses, your nursing home is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This makes fire safety more difficult but even more important.

As a nursing home, you have the added legal and moral requirement to ensure the safety and welfare of your residents, employees and visitors is always at the highest standard. Despite the number of business fires falling year on year, you should assume that your nursing home is safe or that another member of staff will handle it.

The safety of your nursing home is a team effort, and one that with a bit of preparation and organisation, isn’t that hard to get under control.

Nursing-Home-Fire-Safety

Responsible Person(s)

It is everyone’s responsibility to work towards the safety and welfare of all the occupants in your nursing home. However, according to the Fire Safety Order there must be a responsible person appointed, usually the owner, occupier, or someone in control of the premises.

What is the responsible person?

This is the person who is ultimately in charge of ensuring the safety and compliance of your nursing home. They could face potential charges of 15 years in prison. This happens if it is proven that negligence and ignorance caused a fatality in the event of a fire.

The responsible person may appoint one or more ‘competent persons’ to help oversee things. This would ensure everything is in accordance with the Fire Safety Order. This should always be a trusted person within your nursing home. Failure to comply with fire safety rules could leave your business with financial and legal problems.

What should the Responsible Person be doing?

Of course, it’s everyone’s responsibility to be on the look out for fire hazards. However, the liability falls on the responsible person and any appointed competent persons. What should these be doing in order to ensure the safety of your nursing home?

Keep checklists

Lists are one of the best ways to stay organised in a simplistic and task-orientated manner. By law, you need to conduct a fire risk assessment in your nursing home. Our tip is that you should formulate your fire safety checklist whilst you’re conducting your fire risk assessment. That way you can produce a list of places, items and hazard that you should be regularly checking.

Creating a checklist and putting people in charge of inspecting certain areas or items around your business helps to delegate responsibility. Everyone knows their place and role, and ensures your nursing home is as safe as possible all year round, not just after inspections.

Educate yourself on the causes of fires

It is a good idea to educate yourself on the most common causes of fires. This will allow you to place extra importance on checking the areas that are most likely to lead to a fire. Helping provide your team with that knowledge will improve fire safety standards.

As an example, you could zone off your nursing home into different areas of danger. The showers and toilets may be a low danger zone, whereas the kitchen, and communal areas could be a hot zone, thanks to the mass of furniture or cooking equipment. Knowing where a fire is likely to start can help you hone in on your inspections and really give those areas a thorough look through.

Educate and inform your staff and residents.

There’s no point you being a wizard of fire safety if your residents and staff aren’t clued up on fire safety.

We recommend holding annual fire safety training sessions in your nursing home. This, in addition to fire safety training for any new staff, would help keep a safe business. This way you can be confident that you’re surrounded by competent staff and fire savvy residents.

Remember, non-regular visitors are hazards

Non-regular visitors don’t know the ins and outs of your nursing home. They don’t know where the fire exits or fire extinguishers are, and that is dangerous.

For this reason, it is important that you keep them in mind when you are conducting your fire risk assessment. Is your nursing home set up to ensure that any new visitors will know how to act in the case of a fire? Are there signs instructing people what to do in case the worst does happen? Do you have fair safety documents for them to read upon entry? All of these points will make your business safer for everyone.

Extinguishers, alarm, PAT and fixed wires tests

We hope your nursing home is already kitted out with the basics for fire management and safety. But you’d be surprised how many aren’t.

Every nursing home should have an adequate stock of fire extinguishers, fire blankets and smoke alarms. They should also conduct regular (6 monthly, or yearly) electrical tests (PAT and FAT tests) to ensure that your nursing home is electrically safe.

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