The strategy is written on paper. The protection is built into the building

A resident with advanced dementia cannot be walked down a corridor at 3am. A resident on oxygen cannot be carried down two flights of stairs in ninety seconds. Some residents cannot be moved at all without a hoist, a bed or two members of staff, and the night shift may be a handful of people covering forty beds.

So a care home rarely evacuates the way an office does. The fire strategy for almost every care home depends on progressive horizontal evacuation: moving residents sideways, through a fire door, into an adjoining compartment the fire has not reached, and holding them there while the fire is dealt with or the fire service arrives.

It buys time. But it only buys time if that compartment actually resists fire and smoke for as long as the strategy assumes. The wall, the door, the ceiling void and the ductwork all have to do their job. If any one of them fails, the safe compartment stops being safe, and the plan you signed off on collapses in real time. In a building where people cannot run, the building has to do the work for them.

Fire stopping: where the compartment line actually breaks

A compartment wall is rated to hold fire back for a set period, often 30 or 60 minutes. That rating assumes the wall is complete. A wall is only as good as the weakest hole punched through it, and in a care home those holes are everywhere: nurse-call cabling, oxygen and medical gas pipework, radiator pipes, hoist tracks, new circuits for a refurbished wet room, and the steady drip of small alterations nobody records.

Fire stopping is the work of sealing those penetrations so the wall or floor keeps its fire-resistance rating. A service running through a 60-minute wall has to be fire-stopped to hold 60 minutes. When it isn't, you have a direct route for smoke into the compartment you were relying on, and smoke reaches people long before flame does. For residents with limited mobility or respiratory conditions, that is the difference between a contained incident and a fatality.

A compartmentation survey establishes where your fire barriers are meant to run and finds where they have been breached. It is not a one-off. Every time work is done above a ceiling or behind a wall, the compartmentation can be compromised again, so the survey needs a system behind it: a record of what was found, what was fixed, and who checked the work afterwards.

Fire dampers: the hole in the wall you built on purpose

Care homes have significant mechanical ventilation: kitchens, laundries, en-suite extract and, increasingly, comfort cooling. Every duct that crosses a compartment wall is, in effect, a hole cut through your fire barrier. The fire damper is what closes that hole, so smoke and flame cannot travel through the ductwork into the day room where you have just moved twelve residents.

An untested damper is an unknown. Fusible links seize, spring mechanisms stiffen and blades jam. A drop test is the only way to prove a damper actually closes. BS 9999 recommends testing every fire damper at least annually, and much more often where the ductwork runs through dust-laden or similar atmospheres.

Kitchen extract is the exception. Building Regulations guidance and BS 9999 both say fire dampers should not be fitted in kitchen extract ductwork, because grease stops them closing; where the extract has to cross a compartment wall or floor, the duct itself has to be fire-resisting. If an older kitchen extract does have dampers in it, BESA's guidance is to test them at least annually or remove them, with the fire risk assessment reviewed if they come out. Either way, a care home kitchen running long hours builds up grease in the extract system, and grease is fuel. Cleaning to TR19 Grease keeps that fire load down.

Fire doors: worked harder here than anywhere

Care home fire doors take an enormous amount of abuse from bed frames, hoists, meal trolleys and wheelchairs. Cold smoke seals get torn off. Gaps at the threshold grow. Intumescent strips get painted over. Self-closers get disconnected because staff are tired of doors that slam.

Then there is the wedge. A door on a resident corridor gets propped open because staff need line of sight, because a resident with dementia becomes distressed by a closed door, or simply because it is easier for the meal trolley. By the afternoon, three doors on the floor are held open with door stops. A fire door only works closed. Wedged open, it is a gap in your compartment line. The accepted answer is not to prop it but to fit hold-open devices linked to the fire alarm, such as electromagnetic or acoustic holders, so the door releases and self-closes when the alarm sounds. That keeps it usable day to day and working in a fire.

The quarterly and annual fire door checks in the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 are written for blocks of flats over 11 metres, not care homes. That does not reduce your duty. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person must keep fire doors, like every other fire safety measure, in efficient working order, and your fire risk assessment will set how often they are inspected. Given who is in the building, a documented inspection cycle with faults fixed rather than repeatedly logged is the reasonable minimum.

A scenario that plays out more often than it should

A two-storey residential home with thirty-two beds. The fire risk assessment specifies horizontal evacuation into the far wing. On a night inspection, the maintenance contractor finds three things. A cable tray has been run through the compartment wall above a suspended ceiling with no fire stopping around it. A fire door on the cross-corridor has had its self-closer removed after repeated complaints from staff. And the fire damper serving the extract in the linked corridor has not been tested since the ventilation was installed six years earlier. When it is tested, it will not close.

None of these were visible from the corridor. Individually, each looks minor. Together, they mean the "safe" wing shares smoke with the fire wing through the ceiling void, the open door and the ductwork. The evacuation strategy on paper assumes a barrier that no longer exists.

What to do about it

Start by reading your own fire strategy and identifying which compartments it depends on. Then ask three questions:

  • When were the fire dampers last drop-tested, and is there a report naming each one?
  • When was compartmentation last surveyed, and has anyone checked it since the last building works?
  • Are fire doors being inspected on a schedule, with faults logged and fixed?

If you cannot answer any of these with a document, that is where the risk sits. Commission a compartmentation survey that looks above the ceilings and into the risers, not just along the corridors. Have your fire dampers identified, made accessible and drop-tested. Put fire doors on a documented inspection cycle. Fix failures on a prioritised programme, and feed the results back into your fire risk assessment.

Keep every survey, test result and repair in your records. Being unable to show that your protection works is a failing in its own right. In a care home, where the people in the building cannot save themselves, the passive fire protection is not a background detail. It is the plan.