Care Home Evacuation

Video 48 of 51

2 min 35 sec

English

English

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If you are working in a care home, things are a little bit different from a normal environment because you have actually got to evacuate people who cannot maybe walk themselves, maybe they are very sick or they have got mobility problems. Every single care home would have some kind of policy for evacuation. This would be a practised risk assessments that are done and there is proper training on it, all staff, in order to know exactly how they are going to evacuate. If you imagine there was just maybe a small fire somewhere, is it necessary to completely evacuate the whole building? Are you going to hurt people more by getting them out of the building than leaving them where they are? Maybe the fire is contained in one area, and it is being fought. So there can be policies called horizontal evacuation. This will be where people are moved towards the nearest emergency exit, but that is where they stay. So, for example, they are moved towards a fire escape, so they are going from one secure location within the fireside into another one, right by an exit. So they are within an area that they can be evacuated very quickly, but they are still within the safety of the main nursing or care home. If the fire gets worse, then obviously they can be then evacuated easily. Also, if there is more help comes through, then the people are already there to then have the vertical evacuation, to get them out of the building.

A lot of people think that in a care home, you just leave people where they are, and you have got to wait for the fire service to arrive; they will take them out. But that is not the case. If you are looking after people, you are responsible to get them out of the building. They can not do it themselves. And it might be not just one person helping, one carer helping one person. It might be it takes two, three or four people to get someone out of a building. Some people might be bedridden. So we need to move them very, very carefully.

The important thing within the nursing home or care home sector is make sure that you fully understand and you practice all the evacuation policies. You know exactly what to do, who the responsible people are, what the alarms are, and also at what point that you do carry out the vertical evacuation fully out of the building, compared to the horizontal one where you are just moving towards a safe area. If you are working in a hospital, these can be a lot different from a care home. Hospitals typically have much wider corridors and bigger better exits. A care home may well be just a converted home, a normal large house. But with the hospital setting you have got far more area, so you can easily move people out in their beds.

So these different sectors you need to make sure you follow the right precautions that have been laid down by your employer.

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