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Home Safety 2016 – the journey to safe and well This year, for the first time, The Emergency Services Show is providing an entire zone dedicated to Home Safety. Home Safety 2016 will provide visitors to the show with access to the very best in products and approaches being taken by the emergency services to help people live safely in their homes. Words: Catherine Levin. For the fire and rescue service, the move from response to prevention is nothing new. Even before the statutory duty to carry out fire prevention that came with the 2004 Fire and Rescue Services Act, fire and rescue services were working locally to promote safety and prevent fires. Since 2004 and the development of the Home Fire Safety Visit, which came with £25m Government funding, fire and rescue services have carried out hundreds of thousands of visits every year, with around 670,000 in 2013/14 alone. This is impressive and puts the fire and rescue service squarely in the community, trusted to enter homes and provide advice and fit smoke alarms where appropriate. The service provided by firefighters has evolved from the entirely fire focused visit to one that looks more widely at safety and risk in the home.
Hazards to older people One area of safety in the home that fire and rescue services have looked at is the hazards to older people around slips, trips and falls. The impact on an older person of a fall in the home can be substantial and puts pressure on ambulance and other health services, which are already experiencing increasing levels of demand. Anything fire and rescue service staff can do to prevent falls happening in the first place is a real benefit. One example of this is the Hull Falls Rapid Response Team, a partnership between Humberside Fire and Rescue Service and NHS Hull Clinical Commissioning Group (see article on page XX). Its goal is to get to nonemergency falls patients within an hour, get them back on their feet and restore their confidence and independence to remain safely in their own home. There is a great short video available showing just how this works in Hull.
Safe and well visits Fire and rescue services are increasingly working with the NHS through Clinical Commissioning Groups. It is often the case that the people the NHS are concerned about are those that fire and rescue services are also targeting so joining up definitely makes sense. This partnership working has in part led to the development of the concept of the Safe and Well visit. On 1 April, Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service published its new short animation setting out the chronology of how its work has evolved from a responsive service through to a proactive provider of safe and well visits. It’s a bright, modern and quirky approach and really accessible for a wide audience. Over recent months, some fire and rescue services have been hosting local events with health service partners drawn from the local and sometimes regional area to look at how fire and health can work better together. Coalescing under the banner of #fireasahealthasset, fire and rescue services are on a mission to embrace a wide range of local healthcare providers and work out how best to tackle the
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health and social inequalities that make some more vulnerable than others. So far these health ‘summits’ have been held in Cheshire (with Merseyside), the West Midlands, South Yorkshire and most recently in West Yorkshire. There are likely to be many more. There is certainly a high level of interest from health partners in making this work and improving outcomes. Jacquie White and Katie Walkin from NHS England provide more detail on how this partnership works in their article on page XX.
Data is key Much of the work between fire and health is underpinned by data. Targeting the hard to reach is a perennial problem and fire data alone is a blunt and often unsatisfactory measure of fire risk. Add to it the demographic information provided by tools like Experian’s Mosaic and it becomes more refined but in reality identifying those most at risk of fire needs a lot more data. One new dataset available to fire and rescue services is Exeter Data. The Chief Fire Officers’ Association (CFOA) and NHS England have an information sharing agreement that means that all fire and rescue services can now identify people over 65 who are registered with a GP. Evan Morris, formerly of Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service and now CFOA’s lead on Ageing Safely, has explained the background to this approach and his work in brokering this agreement in a short YouTube video.
“Fire and health are natural partners in prevention and increasingly so in response.” Armed with year of birth, gender and address, fire and rescue services can now layer this data with other datasets to refine targeting at a local level. Targeting activity is a long standing task for fire and rescue services and the tools and techniques vary across the country as to how this is best done. The Centre of Excellence for Information Sharing recently published a case study setting out Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service’s ‘Innovative use of the Exeter Health Data’1. It looks at how an organisation can deal with a large quantity of data – in the case of Cheshire, this amounted to 206,000 records. Through a process of strategic intelligence analysis, Cheshire was able to create its own categories of risk using four indices: personal risk, geo-demographic risk, lone person risk and response risk. As a result it was able to hone in on the data and get that large dataset down to lists closer to 20,000.
Partnerships growing in strength What these examples show is the richness of work that is going on in fire and rescue services across the country. The partnership between the fire and rescue service and NHS England in particular is growing in strength and with its focus on long term conditions, it is allowing those involved in commissioning services at a local level to manage demand and see the fire and rescue service as a service provider. The relationships are different for each location, but what is common to all is the determination to improve outcomes and improve people’s quality of life.
Where do the police fit? Fire and health are natural partners in prevention and increasingly so in response, as co-responding is becoming more widely accepted across the fire and rescue service. With fire and rescue services potentially coming under the direction of Police and Crime Commissioners, it is timely to consider how the police fit into this approach and how an integrated service delivery model – for both response and prevention – might assist this in the future. Sir Michael Marmot leads the UCL Institute of Health Equity, which was launched in 2011. He has acknowledged the success of fire and rescue services in reducing health inequalities. In September 2015, West Midlands Fire Service, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service and Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service were awarded Marmot Partnership Status. Sir Michael notes that, ‘the fire services do what every stakeholder involved in reducing health inequalities should do: engage directly with the community, work to provide them with the opportunities they need to live a healthy life and focus on prevention’.
#fireasahealthasset This is a great place for Home Safety 2016 to start and a foundation on which to build the seminar programme under the banner of #fireasahealthasset. It will provide visitors to The Emergency Services Show with a fascinating insight into the partnership work of the emergency services and the wider health sector. More details on speakers will be advertised soon. It is sure to be a very popular feature of the show.
www.emergencyuk.com Reference: 1 http://informationsharing.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Exeter-healthdata-Cheshire-Fire-Case-Study-1.pdf
April2016