Care Home Evacuation
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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.