Dr Kathryn O’Brien, NHS Health and Safety and Fire Safety Manager, is speaking at FIREX International, which takes place between 17-19 June at ExCel London. Register now to hear Kathryn speak about fire-safety management and talks and demonstrations about fire prevention and safety technology and processes
As a result of working in the particularly complex, opaque, fragmented and financially constrained terrain of NHS community healthcare I believe it is time to think differently about fire-risk management (FRM).We can build what we believe to be the best FRM system possible yet still things go wrong and our key messages go unheeded. How many of us simply tolerate fire safety being seen as a largely traditional, highly technical, and sometimes irritating noise lost in the wider corporate risk dialogue? I agree with Ben Bradford that FRM is rightly a separate discipline, not a subset of something else, and that we need competent assessors but we must develop our own practices and competencies even further. All around us many professional, clinical and technical managers are effective in what they do. In addition to defining the competency criteria for the “hard fire safety management” aspects I believe that we must also study, understand and adopt the “soft management skills and behaviours” that make these other managers competent and effective. It is only by us rebranding ourselves, learning a new language and upgrading all of our competencies that we can be influential at the corporate top table to help our organisations and employers get proper return on their investment. We should not be content to “just do fire safety management”. We should add value. The call to action should be it is for us to change our message, change our words, not just shout louder and more often. If you want to read more I have posted a full version of “Change your Words, Change your World: my vision for effective fire risk management” at http://missghost1.wordpress.com
