Make every contact count

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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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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


Community Resilience

Safe and Well as a core component of the person

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Advertise and recruit the best candidates here! Book any size job advert in FIRE magazine And get a free advert on the FIRE website too! Online job adverts usually start from £300. Book an advert in for the following issue(s) December/January February March Take advantage of this time limited offer now by contacting Beverley Rees, Commercial Manager on E: beverley.rees@pavpub.com / M: 0796 8357766 T: 01273 434957

60 | November 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com

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take a long time to see this ambition realised and embedded throughout the Service. “It’s a massive change and a change that comes about because of the Fire and Rescue Service’s exposure to other services. They are part and parcel of one team, one ethic in local areas”. Ged is talking about devolution. Ged talks a lot about devolution. “In certain areas, where they do devolution well, they (the devolved area) will have social services, health, police, housing, regeneration and fire and rescue services all working together. “There’s a danger within devolution that it breeds inequity in terms of how far areas take it on. And different areas will settle around what they think is possible.” Using Greater Manchester as an example, he notes that GMFRS was “built into the prevention plan right from the very beginning, so they have not had to try and get a seat at the table”. How will Ged know that he has been successful during his time with the Fire and Rescue Service? Ged says that he is “sowing the seeds” and “getting the direction of travel right” for Safe and Well. He majors again on devolution. “CFOA needs to understand the diversity that devolution brings” and emphasises the need for all fire and rescue services to be “agile to understand what is going on in their wider political world”. While the shorthand for home fire safety visits of “doing a smoke alarm” may still exist in pockets of the Fire and Rescue Service; “doing a Safe and Well” is certainly more accurate. The hope here, of course, is that it is not just a change of label, but a true cultural and business transformation that results in reduced pressure on the health and social care system. That after all, says Ged, “is a bit of a no brainer”. Ged is keen to visit more fire and rescue services, so get in touch by email: Ged. Devereux@phe.gov.uk

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work they can do, certainly in terms of a brief intervention, that can have significant impact.” Ged talks about MECC – make every contact count – which is not a phrase used by the Fire and Rescue Service, but certainly seems logical in the context of Safe and Well. He is interested in the brief interventions that staff can meaningfully do in a Safe and Well visit and the extent to which they can triage people into different parts of the Fire and Rescue Service or beyond. As part of his work, Ged has encouraged public health workers to go out with front line fire and rescue staff and see how they deliver advice in homes. “They are amazed at the way that they (firefighters) have got that natural inbuilt skill to be able to talk to people”. He knows that there are limits to what fire and rescue staff can do, using the examples of intensive interventions around mental health or social isolation, and is not proposing an extension of firefighter roles. Recognising the challenges of doing this kind of work, Ged uses an example of social isolation, screening questions that are part of the Safe and Well visit. The screening questions are designed to identify triggers that lead to a wellinformed referral. Fire and rescue service staff are in the community, part of that community and are therefore well aware of what is available. Enhancing this knowledge with training and detailed knowledge about referral criteria used by other services means that staff are really able to really hone their work. On a more practical level, Ged says he recognises that the move to a Safe and Well approach is going to be an incremental one and is affected by factors like low recruitment rates. “Ideally, success for us would see Safe and Well as a core component of the person specification and the job description for the firefighters of the future and included in training programmes.” With recruitment at historically low levels, it may


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