Publish date: 18 June 2024
Have you ever wondered what a Fire Safety Officer does at your local hospital? As part of Healthcare Estates and Facilities Day, we spoke with Andy Rain from PHU, to see what the average day looks like.
The Fire Safety Officer is responsible for ensuring the Trust is compliant with current legislation such as fire risk assessments and fire drills, promoting fire safety, liaising with the local fire service and providing training for staff.
How can you promote fire safety?
Part of Andy's role involves working with teams across our sites to identify any hazards and promote safe practice to reduce any risks. By creating awareness, he can help keep staff, patients and visitors safe.
The types of hazards Andy looks out for includes fire doors being wedged open and cluttered corridors.
All PHU and Equans staff undertake mandatory training either online or face to face to ensure they know what to do in case of a fire. This includes learning which extinguisher to use depending on the type of fire.
Which areas does Andy cover in his role?
While Andy does a lot of work at Queen Alexandra Hospital, he also works across our other satellite sites including dialysis centres, office complexes and pharmacy manufacturing unit.
How closely does Andy work with the local fire service?
From planning joint exercises with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service to arranging familiarisation visits for our local stations at Cosham and Southsea, Andy works closely with the teams to ensure everyone's knowledge of the hospital and its layout is up to date.
Any good stats?
At PHU we around 130 fire wardens who receive face to face training on fire drills, identifying hazards and what to do in an emergency. This ensures that we always have staff available across all our sites.
Across QA Hospital, we have 2,853 fire doors and 2,548 call points.
Between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, we had 258 false alarms and 27 attendances from the fire brigade for alarm activations.