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Free seminar programme highlights fire and health working hand in hand Home Safety 2016 is an exciting new show running alongside The Emergency Services Show 2016, which takes place from 21-22 September at the NEC in Birmingham. Within Home Safety 2016, emergency services will be sharing how they are collaborating to deliver a joined up approach to helping people live safely in their homes and equipment suppliers will showcase the very best specialist equipment the market has to offer for the safe home. Words: Catherine Levin. Having working smoke alarms is fundamental to safe homes and we are thrilled that the Fire Kills campaign is supporting Home Safety 2016. We will be working with them to remind everyone to test their smoke alarms regularly. We are really excited that the Chief Fire Officers’ Association (CFOA) is also supporting Home Safety 2016. CFOA has been working in partnership with NHS England and Public Health England to use their resources to support older people and those with long-term conditions. In October 2015 a Consensus statement was produced by these three organisations along with Age UK and the Local Government Association (LGA). It encourages fire and rescue services and local commissioners of services to carry out more safe and well checks in people’s homes. As part of Home Safety 2016, our free seminar programme will explore #fireasahealthasset – fire and health working hand in hand – and how visitors can take these lessons back to their organisations.
Seminar programme Running over two days, the Home Safety 2016 seminar programme will look at different aspects of fire and health working together. The morning session on 21 September will focus on the journey to safe and well. Home fire safety visits are a long standing feature of any fire and rescue service’s prevention programme but over the years they have evolved beyond a single focus on fire safety.
“Changing people’s behaviours is key to the challenges of reducing fire risk in the home.” We heard at the show last year from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service who spoke about their Community Risk Intervention Teams (CRIT) and how they are working with police and ambulance teams to ‘improve the quality of life outcomes for people in a way that also reduces impact on blue light services’. It’s not just Manchester that is evolving its fire and health work. Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service have done a great animation to illustrate the journey and during the seminar visitors will hear from them about how they expanded their work in the health area and the lessons they learnt along the way. We’ll also learn from others who are at different points on the journey to safe and well.
www.emergencyservicestimes.com
working in the data field for many years in many different sectors and he’s behind the new presentation of IRMP data on the West Midlands Fire Service website. Jason will share with us how the data used to target risk in an IRMP context can be used to help work with health and other partners.
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service’s animation illustrates the journey to safe and well.
Working with others In the afternoon of 21 September the Home Safety 2016 seminar programme will be focusing on working with others. It’s nothing new for the fire and rescue service to work with partners drawn from across a wide range of local services, but navigating the world of the NHS is never easy. Humberside Fire and Rescue Service has been working with Hull Clinical Commissioning Group for some time and is making real in roads in the area of slips, trips and falls. We’ll hear from Deputy Chief Fire Officer Chris Blacksell and Director of Commissioning, Erica Daley. Lots of fire and rescue services have great partnerships with their local Age UK branch. Steve Chu is in the unique position of having worked for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue and moved to head up Sheffield Age UK. We’re delighted that Steve will join us to share his experience of moving from the world of fire to the third sector and how fire and rescue services can make the very best of their relationships with Age UK locally. Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service are right at the beginning of their safe and well experience. They launched their new safe and wellbeing approach in February this year. They are focusing on six areas of risk and one of these is dementia. Station Manager Rob Cherrie will talk about his relationship with the Alzheimer’s Society and what success will look like for them. These are just three examples of speakers sharing their work with others in what should prove to be a fascinating afternoon of insights into what makes a partnership truly successful.
Data and research We’ll be taking a look at Exeter Data. Every fire and rescue service in England received this dataset which contains information about over 65s registered at a GP. Armed with the gender, address and date of birth of this cohort, fire and rescue services now have valuable data to help target their community safety activity. We’ll find out how some fire and rescue services are approaching this. We’re really pleased that Jason Davies from West Midlands Fire Service will join us. Jason has been
“This is already shaping up to be a great programme.” This session isn’t just about the data, but also about research. Alex Mills from South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue has done some work using behavioural insights. Changing people’s behaviours is key to the challenges of reducing fire risk in the home. Alex will provide us with his experience of using ‘nudges’ to engage people and encourage them to accept safe and well visits. It’s a social marketing approach from which many others could learn a lot.
Gas Safety Week Gas Safety Week runs from 19-25 September so we are really pleased to be able to support this, with the final segment of the seminar programme purely focused on gas safety. We’ll be looking at various aspects of gas safety and how fire and rescue services can work at a local level with partners to ensure that being CO aware is core to the safe and well visit.
Great opportunity This is already shaping up to be a great programme and we will be adding more speakers over the coming weeks. It’s a great opportunity to take a day out of your busy schedule and look at what fire and rescue services are doing to improve health outcomes and take the learning back to your own organisations to really promote #fireasahealthasset across the country. We’ll update the Home Safety 2016 website and you can keep up to date by following @HomeSafety2016 on Twitter.
www.emergencyuk.com/whats-on/home-safety-2016
June2016