What is the importance of fire safety and prevention?

Fire safety is very important when it comes to keeping buildings and property safe but more importantly, yourself and others. There are a number of simple steps that are really easy to follow to ensure fire safety is up kept. If fire safety is neglected, this increases the fire hazard risk, making a fire more likely to occur.

To highlight the importance of fire safety, fire and rescue services attended 576,000 incidents in the year ending March 2019 (Gov UK) with over 180,000 of these being fires. This was a nine percent increase on the previous year.

Neglecting small details when it comes to fire safety can mean this figure continues to increase even though it is can be so easily avoided. In order to maintain fire safety and prevent fires, you should always conduct a fire risk assessment.

This involves assessing any risks within a building that could pose as a fire hazard, examples of this could include lots of electrical wires building up or having lots of flammable liquids out.

A risk assessment should also involve checking all fire exits are clear and easily accessible, there are adequate fire safety posters in your building and that you are equipped with the appropriate fire fighting equipment should you need it. This would include items such as a fire extinguisher which could be used to put a small fire out.

Fire risk assessments are important to carry out so that you have a well-documented review of fire safety in the workplace so, should an incident occur you know that you have followed the correct steps to keep the building and everyone inside safe.

Training is also as really good way to ensure you are taking fire safety into consideration. If you have a group of people working in a building, an easy way to ensure they are all trained when it comes to anything fire related is to train them using an appropriate DVD. If you work in an office for example, a fire safety DVD based on working in an office would cover realistic scenarios so that it is relatable.

Using fire safety training DVD’s is a great way of training large groups of people at once, they can be used to train new staff and for refresher training making it time and cost effective.

Something else to consider when looking at the important of fire safety and prevention is to always appoint a ‘responsible person’. The responsible person’s job role would then involve all areas of fire training such as testing the fire alarm, conducting fire drills, arranging training and conducting fire risk assessments.

As a business owner or employer it is your responsibility to ensure fire safety and prevention is maintained. With this, many companies assign a responsible person in order to adequately ensure premises are kept fire safe.

Fires cause irreversible damage that can be costly to businesses when considering the time to repair any damage, the financial impact can be detrimental and of course, the threat to people’s health and safety poses a huge threat. Maintaining fire safety and ensuring you can do all you can to prevent fires can be easily resolved by following simple steps such as risk assessments and training.