Siemens Building Products focuses on fire safety in care homes

Care homes have their own specific requirements in terms of the need for effective fire protection, with the elderly occupants and their mobility issues obviously being a particular focus when it comes to selecting an appropriate method of protecting such buildings and their residents from the threat of fire.

This issue of competence is a point raised in a document delivered to Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures UK (CROSS-UK), a confidential reporting system where professionals involved in the built environment can flag fire and structural safety issues they’ve encountered. The report followed a specific Fire and Rescue Service sharing the details of two incidents that exposed residents to risk. The conclusion is that a much wider issue potentially exists across the entire care home sector.

It’s vital to have a clear understanding of what’s required when it comes to ensuring fire safety in a care home. That process begins with effective and sufficiently regular fire risk assessments carried out by a competent assessor who takes both the environment and the types of residents and their specific needs into full account.

Conventional fire alarm systems

Many care homes operate with older conventional fire alarm systems. The British Standard recommends addressable systems to enable the location of an incident to be swiftly identified. Upgrading to an addressable system has cost implications with some systems requiring not only the replacement of devices but also reconfiguration of the wiring into a loop. Others don’t require such wiring changes (providing the cable is of a good standard), thereby offering considerable savings in installation costs.

The British Standard recommends L1 (ie maximum life protection automated fire alarm system coverage throughout) in large nursing homes and many specifications for smaller homes will also specify L1 after the appropriate risk assessment. Minimising false alarms is obviously paramount given the inability for occupants to evacuate quickly.

Zero false alarms is an even better scenario in an application where an alarm can cause panic, confusion and considerable disruption. Jackson Fire and Security Solutions uses Siemens’ Advanced Signal Analysis (ASA) detectors, which include a guarantee of no false alarms, with multi-criteria detection technology used to detect a fire incident on a swift basis. Crucial to this is the ASA, which dynamically responds to different fire and deceptive phenomena signals such as toasters or steam.

Drift compensation, whereby the detector ensures a constant sensitivity despite any build-up of dust or dirt within the chamber, is another essential feature that ensures consistent performance during a detector’s operational lifetime.

Training is ‘fundamental’

Training of the personnel responsible for the installation, commissioning and maintenance of a fire alarm system is also fundamental.

On this point, Steve Jackson (managing director of Jackson Fire and Security Solutions) commented: “Whenever we bring a new franchisee on board, we ensure that they receive full training directly from Siemens in the equipment they will be installing. It’s important that any care home owner or operator checks the competence of anyone employed to carry out work connected to fire safety. There should be no compromise on competence given that this is a life safety issue. We have wide ranging experience in designing and installing systems for care homes and appreciate the particular challenges they represent.”

Rob Yates (head of building products for fire safety applications in the UK and Ireland) responded: “Training has always been an important focus in our relationships with our partners, whether it’s in the online or face-to-face domain. We are constantly looking at our training programmes to make them more customer-focused, ensuring that the full benefits of our systems can be realised. I can only reiterate Steve’s comment about the importance of ensuring the competence of those engineers employed.”

*Further information is available online at www.siemens.com