Fire risk assessment software for residential care home settings.

Most care homes operate a progressive horizontal evacuation strategy. The principle is that vulnerable residents are moved laterally into adjacent fire-safe compartments rather than evacuated all the way out of the building. The compartmentation is designed to resist fire spread for long enough that residents in adjacent compartments remain safe while the affected compartment is dealt with by fire and rescue services.

The strategy depends on multiple things being in place: adequate compartmentation, sufficient staff to assist with horizontal movement, residents being movable (with bed-evacuation equipment for those who are not ambulant), and a clear plan for what happens if the affected compartment cannot be contained.

For the FRA, the evaluation of the progressive horizontal evacuation strategy is one of the most important sections of the assessment. The assessor needs to consider the design assumptions, the current staffing levels, the resident profile, the equipment provision, and the contingency arrangements. FRA Flow surfaces this explicitly.

Care home fire safety response depends heavily on in-house care staff. Staff are present on every shift, know the residents, are trained on the evacuation strategy, and are responsible for executing it during an incident. The FRA needs to consider whether the staffing levels at all times of day are sufficient to execute the evacuation strategy with the current resident population.

Night shifts are a particular consideration: care homes typically run with reduced staffing overnight, but the resident profile is the same. The FRA evaluation of staff-to-resident ratios for evacuation purposes needs to reflect the actual minimum staffing position, not the daytime average.

Staff training, drill frequency, and the integration of the fire safety arrangements with the wider care plan are all relevant FRA findings. FRA Flow captures these in the fire safety arrangements section so they are not buried in generic narrative.