th 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 checklists.
What managers need to consider about fire prevention is keeping apart the three elements that when combined in the right proportions can create fire or explosions. The three elements are heat (also known as source of ignition), fuel (also known as combustible or flammable materials in solid, liquid or gas form) and oxygen (bearing in mind the level of oxygen we need to breathe is the same level that supports fire).
An essential element of fire risk assessment, if properly done by an appropriately trained competent person identifies, assesses and proposes control measures to either eliminate or control the risk and follows up where and when these elements, in combination, may increase the risk of fire. For example, bedding is common in a health care environment, and is a source of fuel. Oxygen is ever present, and may be more concentrated around some patients, but the risk of fire is minimal if there are no sources of heat. Therefore bedding, either laundered or soiled, should always be stored away from sources of heat.
In health care facilities areas, such as laundries, laboratories, pharmacies, heating plants and waste disposal areas may have elevated fire risks as the potential for the combination of fuel and heath may be elevated. Even health care facilities that may be designated smoke free campuses may be at risk from ignition from open flames such as cigarette lighters, matches or discarded cigarettes due to a perceived urgent need to smoke by staff, patients, visitors or contractors who will try to find an area where they can smoke unobserved.
Consider the following situation that occurred in a health care facility.
A fire occurred in a hospital where a cleaning worker, rather than brave the cold and move to a designated smoking area outside of the hospital campus, would frequently go into a linen storage area to sneak a cigarette. One day she lost her live cigarette in a partially full laundry bin which caught fire. A great deal of smoke first activated the alarm system initiating an activation of t