Using Fire Assessment As an Opportunity

Having a professional fire assessment report that relates to your organisation's ability to prevent fire or deal with it should it arise, may sound something of a dull necessity.

Yet a fire assessment report is not meant to be a bureaucratic hurdle that you must reluctantly seek to overcome or periodically work around. If it starts to become seen in this fashion, then that is only a short step from starting to question whether it is necessary at all.

In fact, progressive organisations use this type of safety audit as an integral part of their quality and management system processes. When embedded into a company's culture, these safety inspections may not only become relatively routine and non-controversial, they may actually begin to be seen as being facilitative and offering opportunity.

These studies typically seek to identify:

fire risks in an organisation;
areas where the organisation is failing to comply with prevailing legislation;
recommended actions to address the above risks;
opportunities to improve the knowledge base of the organisation and its employees relating to fire;
where existing management and communications systems may require enhancement (e.g. improved review and signoff procedures).
Although the major objectives relate to the reduction of fire risk and a consequential improvement in compliance with legislation, many organisations may find the associated insights into their organisation and its processes to be enlightening.

Experience in many industries has shown that once quality and safety have been inextricably embedded into an organisation and its basic processes, the overhead of internal monitoring and compliance rapidly reduces.

The risks of major incidents may also decline.

This is not because the threat of a periodic fire assessment is going to frighten people into avoiding bad practice but because safety and fire prevention has simply become second nature to the organisation and its employees.

In organisations where fire risk assessment studies are conducted from a start point of being a necessary evil, the end result may be extensive highlighting of problems and the constant need to spend time and money in remedial actions.

By contrast, organisations that have embedded regular fire risk assessment into their normal practices as a tool to facilitate behavioral change, may find that external assessments subsequently highlight far less required action.

The message is clear. Working with external organisations to develop fire assessment as part of 'business as usual' for your company's management systems will yield dividends - including making external assessment and verification far more routine and less disruptive.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do You Need a Fire Audit?

Image
There are two ways of answering the question "do I need a fire audit?" The first approach concentrates very heavily on the prevailing requirements of the law and majors also on the risks to an organisation that is found to be in breach of the appropriate regulations. The second approach is rather more related to the practicalities involved and it is these that are touched on here: · It would be a brave or perhaps even foolhardy company that stated it had zero risk from fire - a fire audit may help to identify and quantify those risks; · Knowing that risks exist is fine but that knowledge in itself does not reduce them - only appropriate and targeted action is likely to achieve that; · It is therefore typically necessary to identify specific actions required to reduce or remove the risks - and being clear as to what those actions are is something that may require specialist expertise; · Not all the identified risks will necessarily have the same potential for de...
Read more

How to Conduct a Fire Risk Assessment

Image
A capable supervisor considers the security of the business and the majority of the workers truly. A steady organization requires a both wellbeing and security convention. Fire wellbeing must be one of the needs on the rundown. Fire episodes can hand a business into nothing over a snap of a finger. No normal manager or entrepreneur needs that to happen. In this manner, each business and each work environment must shield itself from the risks of fire mishaps. To do that, the strategies of standard fire risk assessment must be one of the significant worries as far as wellbeing measures. Things being what they are, by what means should the assessment be directed? Who and what should be surveyed in the working environment? As a matter of first importance, the business must recognize the greater part of the fire inclined ranges and that they are so inclined to cause fire. Additionally, the distinguishing of ignitable operators in the working environment is expected to dispose of all fi...
Read more

Understanding Employers' Fire Safety Responsibilities - Fire Regulations

Image
No business owner or manager can afford to be ignorant of the basics of statutory fire regulations and how they directly affect the operation of businesses in the UK. There have been health and safety laws in place to help make business premises safer places for some time, but substantial changes to the fire safety laws came into effect in 2006. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order brought a lot of existing laws together and swept others away. The main thrust of the changes was to place the responsibility for safety very much with the employer. No longer could you expect a fire officer to come around and tell you exactly what you had to do. Business owners had to arrange to carry out their own fire risk assessment and then implement the findings of these. It is the introduction of the fire risk assessment that is the single biggest shift in fire regulations in recent years. The work has to be carried out by someone who is competent to do so, and one of the challenges for p...
Read more