Enter and view: Queen’s Hospital: Outpatients’ Department – fire evacuation procedure

Healthwatch Havering conducted an announced Enter and View visit. Healthwatch Havering is aiming to visit all health and social care facilities in the borough. This is a way of ensuring that all services delivered are acceptable and the welfare of the resident, patient or other service-user is not compromised in any way.

This particular Enter and View visit was undertaken as part of a series of visits to out-patient, discharged in-patient and visitors’ facilities at Queen’s Hospital to enable Healthwatch Havering volunteers to view how patients and visitors were dealt with.

Healthwatch Havering visited Queen’s Hospital: Outpatients’ Department on 01/10/2015.

The summary of findings concluded, from a lay perspective, the procedure seemed acceptable and effective, although how well it works can, by definition, only be thoroughly tested in the hopefully unlikely event of an actual fire breaking out. Although the number of staff trained in fire safety is commendably high, every permanent staff member should be thoroughly familiar with the action to be taken in an emergency, both for the specific area or ward in which they work and generally, though clearly there is no need for all to be trained to Fire Warden status. Such training should be repeated at least annually. Moreover, whilst it is perfectly understandable that disruption of patient treatment and or hospital routines should be avoided during fire drills – not least to avoid inadvertently generating unnecessary anxiety among the more vulnerable – occasional full evacuation drills by staff using volunteers as “patients” would surely be a good way of testing the resilience of the evacuation procedures and identifying where improvement might be needed. The team was unable to ask all of the questions that occurred to them and so, a further visit will be undertaken in due course to examine other points.