IHEEM AE EVENT NHSE/I Fire Safety Lead
The third and final speaker in this session was Mazin Daoud, the Chair of IHEEM’s Fire Safety Technical Platform, and Fire Safety Lead at NHSE/I. He began: “That was really interesting, David. Last year, I was an expert witness in a court case, and some of the comments the judge made were very interesting indeed. One of them which I certainly took to heart was about a fire risk assessment that someone had undertaken, which had been criticised by an expert witness. One of the comments that the judge made was that the fire risk assessor could only work on the information that was provided to him , and that if that was lacking, then really that wasn’t his fault, but that of the other party involved.”
“As some of you will know,” he continued,” I am IHEEM’s Fire Safety Technical Platform Chair, and have recently joined NHS England and NHS Improvement as their Fire Officer. I’m going to talk a little bit about the Terms of Reference, look at a couple of them, the HTM, and how IHEEM can help Authorising Engineers in their job. So, first of all, let’s look at these new Terms of Reference. The first one is to create a specific IHEEM policy, to advise on relevant developments in the specialist discipline, and to comment on and influence areas of policy and operational practice for the various technical aspects in that field. So, there’s quite a bit in there.”
Liaison with other bodies
Another aspect of the Terms of Reference, Mazin Daoud explained, was ‘to liaise with other relevant national bodies, and international professional bodies and organisations (with some examples given), for the purpose of sharing information, formulation of policy, advice, or guidance on specialist discipline-specific matters’. He said: “So really it’s about the Technical Platforms here liaising with other groups, other national and international professionals, for the mutual benefit of them in so far as formulating policy advice or guidance go.”
He continued: “Just before the Grenfell Tower fire I was sitting at home, thinking it was a quiet, and that I was not really doing that much in terms of fire safety, and then, all of a sudden, there was a fire on the television. My son’s a firefighter, and at the time was based at the fire station only three miles from Grenfell, and attended on the first make-up, i.e., as soon as the first number of fire engines were increased. I thus gained first-hand knowledge from him of how things went. Grenfell was a game-changer. From that time onwards I became very busy and sought-after, as did fire safety specialists generally. “We now,” he added, “have two items of legislation currently going through Parliament as a direct result of Grenfell.”
Mazin Daoud said: “Grenfell Tower was a game-changer. From that time onwards I became very busy and sought-after, as did fire safety specialists generally.”
One of the outcomes of the Grenfell Inquiry, he explained, had been the Competence Steering Group – its function being ‘to tackle competence shortcomings’ identified in the post-Grenfell Hackitt Review. The Group comprises more than 150 institutions and associations working across the construction industry, built environment, fire safety, and owner-manager sectors.
Interim and final report on GrenfellTower fire
“Having looked at competence,” Mazin Daoud continued, “they came up with an interim report called Raising the bar, and then the final report, Setting the bar, was published last October. It outlines a new competence regime for building a safer future. One of the things they looked at was the fire risk assessor – in other words, the AP, the Authorised Person for fire. So, what did the report say? The objectives aligned to this aim were: ‘to work to raise the fire risk assessor to acceptable competent standards’, and ‘to develop criteria that better define the level of competence needed for high-risk buildings and more complex fire regulations’.” Mazin Daoud said that ‘you can’t really get much higher risk buildings than a hospital’. He expanded: “Who will we get to do our fire risk assessment? Is it someone on one of the other registers that deal with all sorts of buildings? Well, there are not many buildings where you can’t move people inside without the risk of them dying; nor are there many buildings with a helicopter landing pad on the roof. So, these are very specialist circumstances; hospitals and other healthcare facilities are really higher risk buildings, with more complex fire risks than perhaps any other type of building that I can think of, and certainly have more risks than there are in high-rise residential buildings.”
Offering reassurance
Other key objectives to come out of report included: n ‘To clarify how reassurance may be offered to those, including the public, using fire risk assessors involving organisations’;
n ‘To address weaknesses in current practices’, and
n ‘To indicate how improvement could be achieved with a statutory requirement’.
Mazin Daoud told the audience: “So at the moment, we have people doing fire risk assessments in hospitals, most of whom have no accreditation to do so. There are organisations which you can be accredited under, including UKAS, but they aren’t specific to healthcare, while only about 15 per cent of the fire risk assessors doing this work are on any those registers.”
Next focusing on what the HTM says about competence, Mazin Daoud noted that David Harper had gone into considerable detail about competence, and how in fact it was the court made the decision as to whether or not somebody was competent. “In the HTM, however,” he said, “and in the legislation as well, the ‘competent person’ here is ‘a person recognised as having sufficient technical training, and actual experience or technical knowledge and other qualities, both to understand fully the dangers involved, and to undertake properly the statutory and Firecode provisions referred to in this Health Technical Memorandum’.” This definition was, he said, ‘straight out of the HTM 05 series’.
Accredited fire risk assessors The recommendation in Setting the bar, Mazin Daoud added, was that ‘Accredited third-party certification requires risk assessors, and organisations should be
August 2021 Health Estate Journal 41
Natalie Oxford
commons.wikimedia.com CC BY 4.0
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