Fire safety precautions to reduce risk to residents

Have you ever wondered why so many accounts of tragic events begin: “It was just another ordinary day”? The answer is that it is always another ordinary day, until a fire breaks out. It starts off small of course, spreading slowly until someone notices it and sets off an alarm, or the smoke or heat build up enough to activate a detector and the alarm sounds. Once the alarm sounds, we think that the problems are over; the fire has been discovered and has presumably been dealt with, but is this the end of the story? 

Fires don’t just happen in care homes with a terrible reputation, where staff don’t care and the conditions are dreadful. For example, a recent fire in a care home rated ‘good’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), in which fire spread along the roof space, eventually collapsing and leaving two people dead and over 30 injured, shows that there is rather more than just having a lovely home and caring, knowledgeable staff to preventing, detecting and escaping a fire. 

A simple and effective aide-mémoire for fire prevention is the fire triangle; one side is oxygen, one is fuel and the other is heat - if all three are present in sufficient quantities, then a fire will almost certainly result.