Messy,
HTM 83 defines the understanding staff should have regarding fire safety in hospitals. Don't go under the misaprehension that nursing staff are trained to become fire fighters in the obligatory 1 hour training session because as you say quality training, covering all areas of fire safety awareness, cannot be achieved in a single annual training session.
Like any other major organisation, the NHS has grunts and leaders, the grunts do what they can under the leadership of others. Fire fighting is not that difficult in modern hospitals, fire engineering solutions have seen to that (?), fire prevention, fire safety awareness and risk assessment are the keys to creating safe environments, despite the best efforts of the general public. NHS staff as an industrial group are far more fire safety aware than any other comparable group, the fire safety figures for the NHS will back that up.
Fire safety training changes as the role and responsibility of the individual changes, that knowledge and experience is cascaded to the staff as and when necessary, not unlike the fire service, otherwise there would be no need for a rank structure.
The role of the fire safety trainer in the NHS (as I see it), is not to produce hoards of fire extinguisher wielding nurses, but to educate staff at all levels with regard to their roles and responsibilities. Most observers and particularly operational fire fighters do not see beyond staff using fire extinguishers, putting fires out and evacuating the place before the brigade show up, in reality staff have much more to think about, moving their patients to a place of safety for example, progressive horizontal evacuation is the technical term, the eighty odd seconds it takes to totally discharge a 9 litre water extinguisher is best spent moving people away from the source of danger. Who was it said get out and get the fire brigade out? The chance of surviving a fire in hospital (in the UK), is better than average and certainly better than the same situation at home.
So, the training requirement is a minimum of 1 hour annually, believe me they all get much more and topics discussed are relevant to the situation at hand, mental health and learning difficulty units have vastly different problems to general hospitals, who in turn have greater problems than community hospitals who have loads of problems too, it's not cut and dried believe me.
In answer to your question, it isn't, it takes much longer and relies on experience, knowledge and the odd fire resisting compartment or two.
