Fire Warden Training - By: michwofvra

Any good Emergency Plan will depend on staff knowing what to do in the event of a fire, and will almost certainly mean that some staff have particular roles or additional responsibilities. This may include specific duties in an evacuation, but it could also mean specific responsibilities for ongoing safety or fire prevention. These key persons will be your Fire Wardens and in order to make this practice a fact you need to have appropriate fire warden training for these individuals to ensure they have the information they need to carry out their duties.

What will it Include?
All of your staff will have to understand what they need to do if there is a fire or if they are asked to abandon the building. This goes beyond special fire warden training to training or information sharing for all team of workers. Things like emergency exit routes, where the meeting point is and where fire alarm call points are should be known and understood by everyone.
There is also a accountability on employers to pass on to body of workers the findings of their fire risk assessment. This needs doing for all staff, but can also be built into fire warden training too. If you have enough staff that need training, it is probably more worth your while to bring a fire consultant in to your premises and do on site training specially tailored to your needs. This is also likely to work out more cost efficient than sending people away to do a standard course.
Fire warden training should cover the basics of fire safety and prevention, including the fire triangle (oxygen, heat and fuel), which explains that three things you need for a fire to start. It should also cover the basics of the main laws relating to fire safety at work and an understanding of how fire spreads through buildings.
Most training for fire wardens will include a practical consultation on how to use fire extinguishers. This is very vital in making sure individuals are confident about tackling a fire if that is part of their role in an emergency. It is also important to understand about courses of fire and how important it is to use the right extinguisher on certain types of fire. The session could include using several extinguisher types and even fire blankets too.
Specially tailored sessions can also include training in any special roles in an emergency, such as having to check certain areas, switching off any equipment or plant and helping less able people out of the building.
Roles
Once you have trained your fire wardens properly, you cannot then sit back assuming your responsibilities end there. There are many ongoing tasks that must be managed to ensure that your premises are a safe environment, and your fire wardens can assist you in some of these. Having an emergency plan is no good unless everyone knows and understands it. The best way of ensuring this is to hold regular practice evacuation drills.
Only by actually going through the actions that will happen in a fire can you identify any areas where the reality is not quite as straight forward as the theory. After every practice evacuation you should have a debriefing and identify anything that did not go quite as it should have and work out any action points to correct this for next time. Your fire wardens can help run these practice sessions and perhaps have a role in observing how it works and where the issues are.
In addition to this there are regular tasks such as testing your fire alarm system. This is best done on a weekly basis, working your way around the call points trying different ones each week, so that all points get tested regularly. You should have a maintenance contract on your alarm system to ensure that it is tested and maintained regularly. The same applies to your emergency lighting system.
Your fire extinguishers should be checked and maintained and your fire wardens can play a role in helping with this. You will need a specialist engineer to do your official fire extinguisher test, at least once every year, but your fire wardens can do monthly visual checks on all your fire fighting equipment to ensure that everything is in order. These checks can include making sure extinguishers have not been tampered with, they are still in date and they have not been obstructed or moved from where they ought to be.

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