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. This is the reality that shapes almost every care home fire strategy, and it is why so many of them rely on progressive horizontal evacuation rather than a full, immediate escape.
Progressive horizontal evacuation means moving people sideways, through a fire door into an adjoining compartment that the fire has not reached, and holding them there while the fire brigade arrives or the fire is dealt with. It buys time. But it only buys time if the 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.
What has to hold, and why it often doesn't
Three things carry most of the load in a care home, and all three are easy to neglect because you cannot see them working.
Compartment walls and fire stopping. The wall between two compartments is rated to hold fire back for a set period, often 30 or 60 minutes. That rating assumes the wall is complete. In older care homes, and in ones that have been refurbished piecemeal over the years, walls are routinely breached by cables, pipes, nurse-call wiring and new radiator runs. Each unsealed penetration is a route for smoke. A 60-minute wall with a fist-sized hole around a pipe is not a 60-minute wall. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 puts the duty to maintain these measures squarely on the responsible person, and the Building Safety Act 2022 has sharpened the expectation that you can prove it.
Fire doors. Care home fire doors take an enormous amount of abuse — bed frames, hoists, meal trolleys, wheelchairs. Cold smoke seals get torn off. Gaps at the bottom grow. Self-closers get disconnected because staff are tired of doors that slam. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 require responsible persons of buildings over 11 metres to check flat entrance doors annually and communal doors quarterly, but in a care home the practical case for checking every fire door on a routine cycle is far stronger than the legal minimum, because those doors are the walls of your safe compartments.
Fire dampers in the ductwork. Ductwork runs through compartment walls to move air around the building. Where it passes through a fire-rated wall, a fire damper is fitted to close and seal that opening if fire reaches it. If the damper is seized, painted over or blocked, the duct becomes an open channel carrying smoke straight into the compartment you have just moved vulnerable residents into. Dampers should be drop-tested to confirm they actually close, and BS 9999 points to annual testing as good practice, more often in high-risk settings.
A scenario that plays out more often than it should
A two-storey residential home, 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 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 the responsible person should actually do
Start by reading your own fire strategy and identifying which compartments it depends on. Then commission a compartmentation survey that looks above the ceilings and into the risers, not just along the corridors. Put fire doors on a documented inspection cycle and fix faults rather than logging them repeatedly. Have your fire dampers identified, made accessible and drop-tested, and keep the certificates.
Every repair, survey and test result belongs in your records. Under the Building Safety Act, being unable to demonstrate that your protection works is itself a failing. In a care home, where the people in the building cannot save themselves, it is also the difference between a strategy that works and one that only ever existed on paper.