Witness lambasts training at fire home

A former chief nursing officer for Scotland criticised a care home where 14 elderly residents died in a blaze for its complacent attitude towards safety, a fatal accident inquiry has heard.

Anne Jarvie, who was asked to complete a report into the tragedy at Rosepark Care Home in Uddingston, told the inquiry yesterday that she felt staff paid little attention to risk before the fire in 2004 because it was a new building.

In particular she said introduction of a new staff training video on fire safety in 1999, seven years after the home had opened, marked a “missed opportunity” to improve procedures.

She said: “The introduction of the video was a missed oppor-tunity. The opportunity should have been taken to think ‘how am I going to use this video? Am I going to leave staff to interpret it on their own, or would it be better to facilitate some sort of group discussion?’”.

Jarvie said that staff should have taken part in practical exercises such as locating fire exits, extinguishers, and using the home’s fire panel.

She also questioned why neither the owners or any of the nursing staff challenged the contradiction between advice given in the video – that someone should phone the fire brigade as soon as the alarm goes off – and the practice at Rosepark, where staff were told to check for false alarms first.

Jarvie said: “I just get the impression that Rosepark was not a learning organisation, because you should reflect on anything where there is con-fusion and make sure you get it right.”

While there was “nothing fundamentally wrong with the video”, said Jarvie, the residents at Rosepark were “substantially more dependent” than those featured in the film.

Many of those who lost their lives in the blaze, which swept through the home in the early hours of January 31, 2004, had severe dementia and mobility problems, including one woman who was a bipedal amputee.

She also said it was “remiss” of managers not to have ensured that night-staff were included in fire drills and safety lectures.

Staff appeared to follow pro-cedures without thinking them through, said Jarvie.

She added: “If I had been the owner, that would have scared me. There seems to have been no urgency around risk. There was a complacency because it [Rose-park] was a new build. Responsiveness around repairing things when they needed to be repaired was there, but that seems to me to be the extent to which risk was considered.”

At the same time, though, she said she had been “deeply impressed” by the residents’

personal care plans, describing them as “among the best I have seen anywhere in Scotland or beyond”.

However, she said she felt disappointed that the information about a resident’s mobility, the types of support devices they would need in order to get out of bed and move around, and how many members of staff would be required to help them was only applied in terms of “day-to-day routine”, but never factored into an emergency evacuation plan. “That was an omission that shouldn’t have happened,” she said.

The inquiry, in Motherwell, continues.