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Building a fire safety culture in health facilities
Dr David Gold and Neil Vincer, from IOSH, discuss how organisations can ensure that a sustainable workplace fire safety culture is incorporated to all staff in a hospital setting
Health care workers play a vital role in today’s society, especially considering the ageing populations in many countries that need or will need care either in health care facilities or at home. All members of the health care profession should continually work in a safe and healthy environment carrying out practices that do not put them at risk of injury or ill health. A previous article in this journal examined several of the risks health care professionals face and described measure to eliminate or mitigate those risks.
Occupational safety and health promotes the concept of a safety culture. A safety culture exists when workers throughout an organisation not only continually look out for their personal safety and health, but also look out for the safety and health of others including their co-workers. The concept of a safety culture embraces positive values, including attitudes and knowledge. Professionals working in the health care field, by the nature of their profession and their duty of care, extend the safety culture to protect their patients, some of whom cannot look after themselves, especially during an emergency situation.
The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) proposes eight categories of leading indicators of a safety culture. The following are leading indicators, adapted from the ABS publication, that fall under the eight categories:
Communication about fire safety
The organisation: develops means of communication including the provision of information sheets, newsletters, and toolbox talks, in local languages regarding incidents and lessons learned about fire safety; includes adequate fire safety information as part of new employee induction providing; and shares with employees, contractors and visitors policies, goals, directives and standards addressing fire safety.
The organisation: involves all workers and contractors in fire safety; and develops and promotes for all workers means to bring fire safety to their home.
The organisation: documents the presence and use of a fire safety worker feedback mechanism; and ensures that information about fire-related risks, incidents, and near misses are communicated to workers.
The organisation establishes a fair system for fire-related incident investigation.
The organisation: puts in place and maintains a policy mandating fire safety procedures and instructions with specific information on job-specific fire safety; establishes and maintains a policy and procedures for reporting unsafe fire-related conditions and actions; and ensures that fire safety-related checklists are regularly updated.
Promotion of safety
The organisation: has fire safety-related safety goals and objectives; has a procedure making all fire-related incident investigation findings available to workers; and requires senior management attend meetings related to fire safety.
The organisation: regularly implements fire training programmes for different category of emergencies; puts in place and maintains an organisational-wide effort to continually promote fire safety awareness; and puts in place and maintains training programmes for assessing risks related to fire.
The organisation provides fire safety awareness training and puts in place procedures to document the training.
Management of health care facilities, whether public or private, has an upstream responsibility, a duty of care, to ensure all aspects of safety, health and fire safety are addressed and reinforced for health care professionals, patients, visitors, contractors and others visiting the facility.
This publication draws from a publication Fire Safety Risk Assessment: Health care premises that can be downloaded here. The authors recommend carefully examining this document and its associated checkl