Care and public sector
Here you do not evacuate a building. You move people who will not leave on their own.
Care home, hospital, school, nursery, municipal building: the reasoning changes entirely once the occupants cannot get out by themselves, or do not know the place. What protects them is no longer the alarm — it is the compartmentation.
Your obligations
What actually applies to you
You do not walk a bedbound resident down the stairs
In care homes and hospitals the doctrine is horizontal transfer: move occupants to safety behind a fire-resisting wall, into the adjoining compartment on the same floor, rather than trying to empty the building. So what protects them is the walls, the interfaced doors and whether they actually close — not how loud the sounder is.
The certificate governs the licence, and so the funding
Care home, nursery, collective accommodation: the regional operating licence rests on a fire safety certificate issued by the mayor after a fire service report. It has a period of validity and must be renewed. A finding left unresolved does not merely cost a fix: it puts the licence to operate at risk.
An alarm has to reach someone at three in the morning
Detection in bedrooms and circulation areas, transmission to a post genuinely staffed at night, and interfaces actually checked: fire doors, smoke extraction, lift recall. A signal sounding in an empty corridor protects nobody, and night is when staffing is thinnest.
In the public sector, what is not written does not exist
Safety register, inspection body reports, maintenance records, drill dates, staff training: the inspection is as much documentary as technical. It is also what a public tender asks for — and what is missing on the day you have to prove last year’s finding was dealt with.
On inspection day
What gets looked at first
The inspection covers what has to work without anyone thinking about it: a door that closes by itself, a transmission that arrives, a register that keeps up.
- Fire doors in circulation areas: interfaced with detection, or held open by a wedge
- Compartmentation: service penetrations made good after the last works
- Alarm transmission: who receives it at night, and what they do with it
- Signage as far as the place of safety, not merely as far as the exit
- Drills: the date of the last one, and whether night staff took part
- The register: inspection reports, maintenance records, previous findings closed out
A survey of your building
We go compartment by compartment, doors and interfaces included, and you leave with a written report — the one that is missing on the day of the licensing visit.
Frequently asked questions
The answers people ask us for in meetings.
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