Community Resilience
Make every contact count FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on the evolution of the fire and health partnership
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Ged Devereux has been seconded from Public Health England to CFOA and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service to work with fire and rescue services to embed a health and wellbeing approach to support and complement their work
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1 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ptm6kIJ8zaI&noredirect=1
CFOA, which started in April 2016. Building on the Consensus Statement published in October 2015 and the general move to Safe and Well visits, CFOA and health partners published Working Together in June 2016. Essentially this is about how fire and health can work successfully together and complements the prevention ambitions set out in the NHS Five Year Forward View. The NHS has asked every local health and care system in England to come together to create its own plan to “accelerate the implementation” of the Forward View. The resulting Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STP) “will help drive a genuine and sustainable transformation in health and care outcomes between 2016 and 2021”. This provides the strategic context for Ged’s work as he visits fire and rescue services across England. So far he has visited 13 and has plans to visit many more before his 12-month secondment ends in March 2017. He says that many fire and rescue services are already part of the conversation around the STP and that this environment offers opportunities to embed fire at the heart of a wider health agenda. He would like to see all English fire and rescue services included in one of the 44 STPs. A key part of Ged’s work is the creation of the design principles for a Safe and Well visit. He is doing this by capturing best practice and the best interventions currently in use across England. Ged is also supporting colleagues from NHS England and the Fire and Rescue Service to develop a standard evaluation framework to assist fire and rescue services reviewing and editing Safe and Well programmes. The draft documents were presented to the Fire and Health Summit (health partners, CFOA and the Local Government Association) in October 2016. The plan is then to see them used by fire and rescue services to inform onward development of Safe and Well but always with a local slant. He is keen to point out that a national approach will not work. And he is right to do so: the Fire and Rescue Service is not always able to adopt national approaches. He says that the design of Safe and Well visits should be geared to local circumstances and must include detailed consultation with local health partners. What works in one area will not necessarily work in another. “We are not imagining that fire and rescue services are a replacement service. They have a fundamental role in home safety and fire safety within the home setting, but it is the additional
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very so often a new phrase emerges that captures the zeitgeist; something quite special but rather abstract and hard to define. That phrase is #fireasahealthasset. Years ago a hashtag was just a funny character on a keyboard, now it is part of everyday parlance as Twitter has become a common and increasingly important way in which information is shared and communicated. The Fire and Rescue Service is not known for being on the vanguard of such developments, but with the emergence of #fireasahealthasset, it has created a short hand that allows a conversation to take place about the evolution of fire prevention. The world of fire prevention had changed because of a wider realisation that a one-time visit to a home solely to look at generic fire risk is an opportunity to address underlying fire risks that are also wider issues of health and wellbeing in at risk communities. The privilege of being allowed into someone’s home reveals risks that have far wider implications than the realm of fire safety. Equipping Fire and Rescue Service staff to deal with more specific fire risks has led to the traditional home fire safety visit/check morphing into the Safe and Well visit. This is set out well in the short animation developed by Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service and now adopted by CFOA1. CFOA has also taken a strategic view that more is needed to be done in the arena of fire and health. As a result, Ged Devereux has been seconded from Public Health England to CFOA and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) to work with fire and rescue services to embed a health and wellbeing approach to support and complement their work. Interviewing Ged in the rarefied surroundings of the British Library, he is brimming with enthusiasm for his work and talks at great length in a vernacular littered with acronyms and terms that are unfamiliar to the fire world. Ged is not a recent convert to the Fire and Rescue Service. He has worked in public health for local government for over 26 years and has been at Public Health England for the past three years. He has worked with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service to help build interventions in their work that complement both fire and health. Ged was also on the steering group for the CFOA-led Winter Pressures Pilot. All of this makes him a good candidate for this national role with
“We are not imagining that fire and rescue services are a replacement service... it is the additional work they can do, certainly in terms of a brief intervention that can have significant impact”
November 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com | 59