The strategy that changes everything
A care home rarely evacuates the way an office does. When the alarm sounds, most residents can't walk down a stairwell unaided, and some can't be moved at all without a hoist, a bed, or several staff. So the fire strategy for a care home usually depends on progressive horizontal evacuation — moving residents sideways, through a fire door, into an adjoining compartment that is protected from the fire, rather than straight out of the building.
That single fact reshapes your fire safety priorities. The whole plan rests on the assumption that the compartment next door will stay tenable — smoke-free, heat-free, survivable — long enough for staff to move people and for the fire service to arrive. If the wall between the fire and that safe compartment leaks, the strategy fails at the exact moment it matters. This is why passive fire protection in a care home is not a box-ticking exercise. It is the mechanism that buys your residents time they physically cannot make up by walking faster.
Where the compartment line actually breaks
A compartment wall is only as good as the weakest hole punched through it. In a care home, those holes are everywhere: nurse-call cabling, oxygen and medical gas pipework, radiator pipes, hoist tracks running through corridor walls, and the constant drip of small alterations that a maintenance team makes without anyone recording it.
Fire stopping is the discipline of sealing those penetrations so the wall or floor keeps its fire-resistance rating. A service that runs through a two-hour compartment wall must be firestopped to maintain two hours. When it isn't — when a cable tray was pulled through and the hole was never properly sealed — you have a direct path for smoke into the compartment you were relying on to keep people safe.
Under the Fire Safety Order, your fire risk assessment has to consider the condition of these fire-resisting elements. Since the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 tightened expectations, "we assume it's fine" is not a defensible position. You need a compartmentation survey that has actually looked above the ceilings and inside the risers, and a record of what was found and put right.
Fire dampers and the ductwork nobody looks at
Care homes have significant mechanical ventilation — kitchens, laundries, en-suite extract, and increasingly comfort cooling. Wherever a duct crosses a compartment wall, there should be a fire damper that closes to stop fire and smoke travelling through the ductwork into the next compartment.
Those dampers must be tested at least annually, and within the first year of installation, in line with BS 9999. A damper seized with grease, painted over, or blocked by a later ductwork alteration will not close. On a residential floor, that means the corridor your staff are trying to use as an escape route fills with smoke through a route nobody could see.
The ductwork itself matters too. A care home kitchen operating long hours builds grease deposits in the extract system, and grease is fuel. TR19 sets the standard for ductwork cleaning and hygiene, and keeping the extract clean reduces both fire load and the risk of a fire spreading through the very ducting your dampers are meant to protect.
Fire doors, and why they get abused
Here is a scenario any care home manager will recognise. A fire door on a resident corridor is wedged open because staff need line of sight, or because a resident with dementia becomes distressed by a closed door, or simply because it's easier for the meal trolley. By the afternoon, three doors on that floor are held open with fire extinguishers and door stops.
A fire door only works closed. Held open on a wedge, it is no longer a fire door — it is a gap in your compartment line. The lawful answer is not to prop it, but to fit hold-open devices linked to the fire alarm (such as acoustic or electromagnetic holders) so the door releases and self-closes when the alarm sounds. That keeps the door usable day to day and functional in a fire.
Care home fire doors also take heavy traffic — beds, wheelchairs, hoists — so gaps grow, closers weaken, and seals get knocked off. Regular fire door inspection catches this before it matters.
What to do about it
Start by getting three things surveyed honestly: your compartmentation, your fire dampers, and your fire doors. Cross-check the findings against your fire strategy — specifically, whether each protected compartment can genuinely hold. Fix the failures on a prioritised programme, keep the records, and feed it all back into your fire risk assessment. In a building where people cannot run, the building has to do the work for them.