Fire risk assessments for care homes and supported living from £349

Residential care combines the two conditions that make fire most dangerous: people asleep, and people who cannot self-evacuate. In an office, the assessment can reasonably assume everybody walks out when the alarm sounds. In a care home it cannot. The assessment has to work backwards from the slowest resident on the highest dependency, at the hour with the fewest staff, and ask what actually happens. That is why care home assessments take longer, cost more than a standard commercial visit, and why a generic template applied to a care setting is close to worthless.

Most care homes rely on progressive horizontal evacuation: residents are moved sideways through a fire-resisting wall into an adjoining compartment rather than being taken down stairs and outside. It is the right strategy, but it only works if the compartment lines are intact, the cross-corridor doors close and latch, the receiving compartment has capacity for the residents arriving in it, and staff know which way to move people. We check every one of those in turn. Breached compartmentation above a ceiling line is the single most common finding, and it quietly invalidates the whole strategy.

A strategy that requires four staff to move eight dependent residents does not work with two on shift. We ask for the actual night rota, the dependency profile of current residents, and the time it would take the responding staff to reach the furthest bedroom. Where the numbers do not add up, the report says so and quantifies it, because that is the finding a registered manager needs in order to make the case for the resource. Where they do add up, we record the reasoning so the home can evidence it rather than assert it.

PEEPs go stale faster than any other fire safety record because resident dependency changes month to month. We review a sample against current care plans and comment on the process, not just the paperwork: who updates a PEEP when mobility changes, where it is held, and whether agency staff can find it at night. A folder of PEEPs written on admission and never revisited is a finding, even when every plan in it is technically present.

Care homes carry risks other buildings do not: emollient creams that make bedding and clothing readily ignitable, oxygen concentrators and cylinders, profiling beds and pressure-relieving mattresses, mobility scooter and wheelchair charging, and smoking arrangements for residents with capacity to choose. Each of these needs its own control, and each appears in coroners' findings with depressing regularity. The assessment covers them explicitly rather than folding them into a general housekeeping comment.

Inspections rarely ask to see the fire risk assessment in isolation. They ask how you know the actions were done, when staff last practised a night-time evacuation, whether the alarm is maintained and to what category, and whether the person who wrote the assessment was competent to do so. Our reports carry the assessor's registration details, band each action by priority with the specific duty it satisfies, and include a straightforward evidence checklist covering drills, training, testing and door checks so the home can see at a glance what is outstanding.

Supported living and extra care schemes sit awkwardly between housing and care, and the responsible person is often unclear. Where the accommodation is self-contained tenancies with care brought in, the building may be assessed as a residential block with a stay-put strategy — but if the residents living there cannot follow a stay-put instruction, that strategy has to be challenged. We look at the reality of who lives there rather than the tenure label, and set out plainly which duties fall to the landlord and which to the care provider.

A small residential home of up to around 20 beds on one or two floors is typically £349 to £549. Larger nursing homes, dementia units and multi-wing schemes are usually £549 to £1,200 depending on floor area, compartment count and the depth of evacuation review needed. Groups running several homes get programme pricing with one renewal calendar. Everything is fixed in writing before the visit, and the report follows within 24 hours of the survey.